“Nick McDonell’s Twelve is an astonishing rush of a first novel, all heat and ice and inexorable narrative... a pleasure to read, a horror to contemplate, a real achievement.” —Joan Didion

“As fast as speed, as relentless as acid... McDonell gives us a palpable sense of the privileged but spiritually desolate world...” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

 “Frightening acuity...” —Vanity Fair

“Twelve has a mentorless feel, like something that percolated from his experiences and came out fresh.” —Los Angeles Times

“Captures the zeitgeist of confused adolescents and a sick culture post-Columbine.” —Hartford Courant

“McDonell is an authentic talent and, long after the storms of hype have died away, his novel will endure as a snapshot of his generation as surely as Less than Zero did of the eighties.” —Stephanie Merritt, The Observer (London)

“Consistently brilliant. Every subtle, thought-provoking, poetic moment in fits on top of the last, creating a narrative as precarious and complex as a tower of children’s building blocks...” —Independent on Sunday (London)