“In both concept and execution the novel is a serious piece of work at once vastly entertaining and ambitious on a scale that leaves much of contemporary Irish fiction looking woefully insubstantial….there will be few better historical novels published this year.”
The Sunday Times
“A novel wondrous in tone and reach.”
The Irish Times
"The writing is stupendously good, crisply lyrical without ever becoming absorbed by its own density." - The Australian."
The Australian
"O’Loughlin is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting novelists currently at work."
Sunday Business Post
“An enthralling series of interlocking mysteries; masterfully evokes the beauty of polar regions.”
Gavin Francis, author
“Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter … may well be the Franklin novel to end all Franklin novels. Never have so many different narrative threads been taken up and twined together.. It would seem a daunting task to connect so many historical figures in a single volume, something like trapping demons in a cursed box, but the talisman that O’Loughlin employs is deceptively modest: a single marine chronometer, Arnold 294, which showed up intact at a 2009 auction in the UK when it was supposed to have been issued to Franklin’s ships 164 years previously.”
The Arctic Book Review