"[Waidner's] explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine. This alone is reason to read them."–Bernardine Evaristo, The New York Times Book Review
"This novel is part Franz Kafka, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part Monty Python, but mostly it's completely sui generis. And it succeeds on every level a novel can. Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart."–Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Waidner's refreshingly absurdist third novel . . . is a topsy-turvy journey across Camden Town from the point of view of a nonbinary migrant, a Kafkaesque adventure that encompasses bullfighters, footballers, time-traveling spaceships, and a high-drama trial."
–Michelle Hart, Electric Literature's "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of Spring 2023" "A dizzying blend of ordinary and strange–[
Sterling Karat Gold is] full of time travel, spaceships, and the everyday dilemmas of contemporary life."
–Laura Sackton, Book Riot "[A] piece of winged originality."
–Ali Smith, The Guardian "Fearless, clever, and blazingly original, Isabel Waidner's latest is a riotous parable of resistance in the key of Hieronymous Bosch.
Sterling Karat Gold advances its searing indictment of injustice and hypocrisy with equal parts wit and guts–all the while honoring the joys of queer friendship and fashion-forward time travel. There's nothing else like this in the world."
–Megan Milks
"Revelatory. This novel is a portal into our own world and the queer, migrant resistance that urgently reshapes it. It is an intervention into all the forces that keep us apart, and a call for us to use whatever means possible–including time travel–to stay together."
–Joss Lake, author of Future Feeling "In neon, polyester, in ALL-CAPS-BLAZING-QUEER AESTHETICS, Waidner delivers a novel in which fiction finds itself refreshed–kitsch, urban, a kind of collage, assemblage. A glittering queer futurism that moves from album covers to spaceships, from bullfights to detention centers, Sterling Karat Gold interrogates whiteness, capitalism, and nationhood in language as witty as it is intelligent, as spoken as it is written. This novel made me homesick–I bought pastel trackies within the week."
–Lars Horn
