“Wyman collapses the distance between himself and the book’s narrator, so that we eventually come to mistake him for Wolff’s Toby.”
      —Publishers Weekly

“Wyman’s reading is believable and often touching.”
      —Booklist

“This Boy’s Life is as fine as any of Wolff’s novels. It is honest and pure, without a trace of self-pity.”
      —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A coming-of-age-with-pluck remembrance that is heartwarming and heartbreaking, deadly funny, deeply serious, achingly real.”
      —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn.”
      —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“So absolutely clear and hypnotic . . . that a reader wants to take it apart and find some simple way to describe why it works so beautifully.”
      —The New York Times

“[This] extraordinary new memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience.”
      —San Francisco Chronicle

“Wolff’s genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy’s Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff’s writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the ’50s.”
      —The Oregonian

“Consistently entertaining—richer, darker, and funnier than anything else Tobias Wolff has written.”
      —The New York Times Book Review

“Wolf writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, creates suspense around ordinary events, locating deep mystery within them. . . . To the rich fiction of childhood that ranges from Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye, Wolff has contributed his superb memoir.”
      —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A finely composed and fastidiously voiced recollection of a troubled adolescence.”
      —The New Yorker

“What emerges from this memoir is an absorbing story of a boy we are glad to have met, and a man whose next book we eagerly await.”
      —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Wonderfully funny ...What a fine story.”
      —Richard Russo, The Chicago Tribune

“Unforgettable.”
      —Time magazine

“At once compassionate and deeply disturbing . . . ”
      —The New York Times Magazine

“Some of [Wolff’s] brattish misdeeds are funny, some are pathetic, and all are amazing, because it seems so unlikely that the bewildered juvenile nuisance was to become the excellent writer he is.”
      —The Atlantic Monthly

“A jewel-like memoir of childhood in the 1950s . . . Lucid, bitter, precise, terribly sad: the real-life equivalent of Wolff’s acclaimed fiction.”
      —Kirkus

TOBIAS WOLFF was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1945. He is the author of several works, including In Pharaoh’s Army, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the novel, The Barracks Thief, which won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.