Given Grass’s close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era.
Observer

Given Grass’s close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era.
Phil Mongredien, Observer Review

Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations…Mitchell’s excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece.
The Times

Mitchell has captured the novel’s syncopated, driving rhythms with an extra brio and brilliance.
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

The Tin Drum has had an enduring impact on international fiction, and to read this new translation is to experience a novel you may or may not already know and discover a living, talking, shouting work of art.
Irish Times, Books of the Year

At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice – Dickens made me want to be a writer – but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’ full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos – all with an unforgiving conscience.
John Irving, New York Times Book Review

Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game
Daily Telegraph

Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations…Mitchell’s excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece.
The Times

Encountering The Tin Drum in the early sixties was like discovering a new planet, a reinvention of literature. It brings the exhilaration of discovery, linked with an enormous gratitude for the way in which Günter Grass makes the world a worthwhile place to be in, and living a worthwhile thing to do. He has forever pushed back – and opened up – our concept and awareness of what is real, and what is possible, and what we dare to dream about.
André Brink

At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice – Dickens made me want to be a writer – but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’ full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos – all with an unforgiving conscience.
John Irving, New York Times Book Review

This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves – that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers. I have tried to learn the lessons of the midget drummer.
Salman Rushdie, from his introduction to On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983, by Günter Grass

This is a big book in every sense, full of extraordinary scenes and characters: even on a single reading it seems prodigally rich in comic invention, and demands to be worried at time and again
Sunday Times

The Tin Drum has had an enduring impact on international fiction, and to read this new translation is to experience a novel you may or may not already know and discover a living, talking, shouting work of art
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

The Tin Drum seems so essential and familiar to us now it is easy to forget how revolutionary his meta-fictional intertwining of form and content actually was at the time. Upon recently rereading The Tin Drum, however, it was not his exquisite scaffolding or precise narrative maneuvering that struck me, but rather the overwhelming heart that permeates the novel.
Reif Larsen

Encountering The Tin Drum in the early sixties was like discovering a new planet, a reinvention of literature. It brings the exhilaration of discovery, linked with an enormous gratitude for the way in which Günter Grass makes the world a worthwhile place to be in, and living a worthwhile thing to do. He has forever pushed back – and opened up – our concept and awareness of what is real, and what is possible, and what we dare to dream about.
André Brink

The new translation by Breon Mitchell sticks much more closely to the original text than Manheim’s and emulates some of the German linguistic traits that Grass uses….this new translation of Die Blechtrommel reminds us, Grass retains his huge stature as a novelist
New Statesman

Mitchell has captured the novel’s syncopated, driving rhythms with an extra brio and brilliance
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game
Daily Telegraph

This is a big book in every sense, full of extraordinary scenes and characters: even on a single reading it seems prodigally rich in comic invention, and demands to be worried at time and again
Julian Mitchell, Sunday Times