With crystalline clarity, Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird tells the story of humanity's evolution on an epic scale that spans as far into the future as the human imagination could possibly allow
- International Booker Prize judges,
No other book of hers convinces me more that Kawakami used to be a teacher of chemistry. A sad but beautiful depiction of a perishing world
- Banana Yoshimoto,
There's real satisfaction in figuring out how the chapters connect, and all are richly imagined
Telegraph
Haunting... it offers a powerful corrective to the assumption of human primacy
Guardian