"Newcomers is an emblem of what memory — personal memory, political memory, a place’s memory — can create from erasure... Curiously hypnotic."

"A vigorous translation by Michael Biggins ... this work achieves the panoramic effects of H.G. Adler’s Shoah trilogy by way of Joycean stream of consciousness. Its arrival in English is most welcome."

"A powerful chronicle of conflict and upheaval within both a family and a country, as told, and experienced, by a young, engaging, clearsighted boy...Kovačič skillfully depicts a tough, nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence in a city gripped by ethnic tension, rampant nationalism and the threat of war...This fine novel is not only accessible, but deeply memorable."

"A haunting account of the harmful effects of adult behavior on the impressionable minds of children...The plot may restrict the setting to a Slovenia decades past, but to Alojz and the reader, it is a dangerous, yet strangely vital world, imposing its bleak and unjust order on all witnesses."

"Epic and panoramic...Newcomers turns stereotypes on their heads, as novels of the century should do--stereotypes such as the dignity of rural poverty, the unifying sanctity of the Slovenian language, and the noble heroism of resistance."

"Kovačič impressively catches the mood of the early years of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The volumes are masterpieces. They are bitter, but grippingly intense in their description…Newcomers is a mnemonic sleight of hand of botanical exactitude, a weighty historical document whose significance will only grow."

"One of the major Slovenian prose writers of the last sixty years."

"Kovačič’s book gives us a social, cultural, and political portrait of Slovenia in the 1930s until the Axis aggression against Yugoslavia (from 1941 to 1945). World War II will be the focus of the second book of the trilogy, which I hope will be translated soon.... [Kovačič's] outsider status allowed him to depict this controversial historical phase in a way that a Slovene-born peer could never do."