"Editors' Choice: A spare, beautiful exploration."
New York Times Book Review
"[A] remarkable book ... [It] succeeds so profoundly—the sequences flow through time and space and from one person's voice to another with calm assurance, like a great musical composition."
Sunday Star Times [New Zealand]
"[A] story that is troubling in its immediacy, and which, via an intuitive sensitivity, captures a striking truth … Very simply, without pathos, without artifice, this personal account is written with the infinite gentleness of sorrow that has found peace."
"The most impressive opening sentence of this literary season."
"A stirring account of sorrow and heartbreak."
"Adorján has written a book that shimmers with a sense of the casual comedy of human life…It is certainly the work of a natural writer, graceful as well as forceful…one of the most striking memoirs to be published anywhere in years."
"Spare, beautiful.... artfully reconstructs the day in 1991 when her grandparents took their own lives in a suicide pact.... This fascinating couple come slowly into focus for the author and reader simultaneously, or so Adorjan makes it seem. That's what makes a good memoir...a shared discovery."
The New York Times Book Review
"As Adorján tries to understand her grandparents’ death, she also confronts her own feelings about her sense of heritage and identity. Blending history, memoir, and imaginative writing, Adorján’s nonlinear procedure creates a poignant narrative of unwavering love."
"This is an intense, complex, uplifting, passionate, painful and often hilarious story of love."
"Her simple and direct style renders the story with a perfect clarity."
"Sophisticated intelligence, coupled with the sensibility of an artist."
"I was very much moved by An Exclusive Love —such clarity of thought and feeling. What I think of Anthea Bell as a translator is little short of reverence, after what she did for W. G. Sebald: one trusts her absolutely, so I know for sure that Johanna Adorján writes with beautiful precision and suppleness. It's a truly memorable book."
"Exclusive, that is to say singular , in every way: in its project, in its realization and in its translation. A breathtaking fairytale of suicide."
Irène Heidelberger-Leonard
"A wonderful narrative about an extraordinary couple—enchanting, warm, and consoling."
"Best described as literary non-fiction, this memoir moved me to laughter and tears."
"The fact that the author does not tire in inquiring into this riddle, that she scrutinizes everything anew, courageously and with a biting wit, makes her book about a grim Sunday a sparkling work."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [Germany]
"A very poignant book."
"A haunting, beautifully composed book …Like Francine du Plessix Gray's Them , Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, An Exclusive Love offers a fascinating new angle on the Holocaust filtered through the perspective of survivors' progeny.... In imagining what her grandparents' feelings and actions might have been on their last day, Adorjan hits upon a powerful dramatic structure that builds from the quotidian to the shocking.... Sensitive, intelligent and profoundly moving, An Exclusive Love will leave you stunned."
"Offers a prism through which one might examine and perhaps come to understand a most complicated act."
