Ronald Florence

Only when you read two or three new books a week for five or six years do you realize how truly rare a novel like this is. The Gypsy Man is a story. It's the kind of story that, when you were young, your mother might have let you check out of the library's adult section. She'd know it would be all right for a curious kid to read because the binding would be well broken, the pages well thumbed, and that telltale red line denoting explicit sex [would be] absent. Above all, the library would have reassured her that The Gypsy Man was rooted in history, the research authentic, its author had taught at Harvard, and — this is difficult to put into words, because it really is rare — the characters depicted here appear to be real, like human beings. Not squalid human beings, or fancy ones, or even smart ones. Just real ones.

— Carolyn See, The Los Angeles Times

A bitterly emotional novel … a tense, exciting mystery which ultimately concludes as a morality play.

— St. Lous Post-Dispatch

An intense and powerful tale.

— The Pittsburgh Press

…read the book several times since first encountering it in 1986. The novel never disappoints and always teaches me something new about this writing art and craft.

—Mort Castle, Columbia College

Without exaggerating, one of the most powerful books I have ever read.

—Katharina Galor, Brown University