Press Reviews

• Wendy Erskine

  Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance. In Xstabeth it'll give you a special and magickal alchemy of metaphysics, singer-songwriters and golf, angelic entities, memory and grace. What a thrill to take this remarkable trip to St Andrews and Russia, in the arms of music and synchronicity

• Edna O'Brien

  I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless, enigmatic , unsettling quality of dream. In Xstabeth, as with For the Good Times, the narrative shuttles between episodes of nearness and chasm ... Reading it feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music

• Kim Gordon

  This book spoke, it said "read me" from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy and a constant feeling of being unhinged so I had to keep up with it

• Kavus Torabi

  Inspiring and brilliant

• Salena Godden

  A delicious, dark and haunting book, from the first page I couldn't let it go and I know Xstabeth will stay with me for ever. The book contains magic and intrigue. It is a 21st century cult classic

• John Phipps

  Literary Review

  It is one of the most interesting novels I've come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn't done with me yet

• Houman Barekat

  Spectator

  The prose has a mesmeric quality... Xstabeth reprises the manic idealism of This is Memorial Device (2017), Keenan's exuberant debut novel about the post-punk scene in 1980s Airdrie. Tomasz, a disciple of Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake, cuts a brooding but sympathetic figure

• Peter Murphy

  Irish Times

  As close to a song as any prose work I've read. And Keenan is gloriously, unfashionably mystical in his approach

• Daily Mail

  One of the most exciting new writers around.

• Kevin Williamson

  XSTABETH is special. A ghostly shimmer of a novel

• Irish Times

  Tautly edited, the sheer stylistic euphoria of Keenan's form seems to breathe itself to life . . . XSTABETH is a psychedelic circle from darness into light

• John Phipps

  Literary Review

  It is one of the most interesting novels I have come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn't done with me yet

• Hannah McGill

  Scotsman

  Though possessed of a driving intensity and an abundance of ideas, his prose never feels didactic or dry. It's an invitation to share in what he feels - as raw, warm, bloody and poignant as it is intellectually engaged

• Carrie O'Grady

  Guardian

  You can lose yourself in the novel's weird loops and whorls, searching for resolution while luxuriating in the lack of it . . . This is Keenan's most gnomic, gnostic work yet - at times it seems only loosely tethered to reality - yet it's never portentous. There's something here of the 19th-century Russian novelists' passion for authenticity, their fervid drama. There are funny lines, too, which undercut the mysticism in a satisfyingly earthy way . . . the sense of a synchronous world being created even as you read, where past visions spark memories that echo the present, leaping across synaptic gaps with the grace of a bird in flight

• Sarah Hughes

  The i

  The pleasures of Xstabeth lie in the ways in which the inventive Keenan plays with language and form

• Dazed

  Buzzing with energy and manic idealism, Xstabeth is a wild ride that shatters expectation

• List

  Keenan's hot streak continues with this bold effort that travels between St. Andrews and Russia, taking in on the metaphysics of golf and the power of art and music

• Jonathan Derbyshire

  Financial Times

  In a record shop in St Andrews, Aneliya and her father come across a Russian pressing of the Xstabeth record. The man behind the counter puts it on. "Pure loner folk," he says admiringly. "A genre of one." The same might be said of this gloriously sui generis novel