Selected Reviews

The Trains of Europe [...] offers many things: it is a disturbing vision of Europe in ruins; an exploration of the tenuousness of human relationships; a transnational love story; a glimpse at the avant-garde marginalia of the Berlin art world; a self-reflexive mediation on the form and function of fiction; a physics lesson on thermodynamics, entropy and the arrow of time; and a history of the trains of continental Europe. It is also an audacious experiment in literary form, combining modes as diverse as myth, realism and speculative fiction, as well as in narrative construction, for this is a novel that is structured in reverse[…] there is a lingering note of hopefulness, however melancholy, in this remarkable work of fiction.

— Eoghan Smith, April 2024, 3AM Magazine

First published in 2011, The Readymades went out of print too quickly for many of us to get hold of a book often mentioned as one of the best Irish novels of recent years. Now, happily, it has been reprinted and it doesn’t take long to realise that it is indeed an ingenious work documenting, in every sense, the circumstances in which a group of artists - friends since they grew up together in Serbia - who participated in the appalling ethnic wars that started after the end of communism in Yugoslavia, live creative, if turbulent lives that can never be separated from the depravity of the violence in which they once took part and which both fuels their art and corrodes their unity of purpose. 

— Declan O’Driscoll, December 2019, The Irish Times

The Readymades, John Holten‘s 2011 debut novel, was a marvel. A Bolañoesque, avant-garde page-turner, it trained a breezily pan-European sensibility on the story of a shadowy Serbian art collective at large in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Alongside the book’s heady inventiveness, there were ample doses of sex, drugs and alcohol, and exhilarating, wistful evocations of being young, broke and brilliant in post-Cold War Europe.

— Rob Doyle, April 2015, gorse 

Oslo, Norway, the second in Holten’s Ragnarok trilogy that began with the widely acclaimed The Readymades, cleverly gathers romance, cartography and Nordic myth in a meta-fictional retelling or interpretation of the streets of the eponymous capital. A self-aware tale of love and the fictions that are told in the process of it, the novel will be enjoyed by readers of Bolaño, Cortázar and Calvino and should be attempted by others.

— Phil Clement, December 2015, Structo magazine

Holten's novel is one of the greatest works of art to come out of Berlin in recent years...You could say that LGB are the Next Big Thing to come out of Berlin, the timely projection of an embattled nexus - East versus West, the Real World versus the Art World, Purity versus Commodification, Literature versus the Visual Arts, Fiction versus Truth.

 — Travis Jeppesen, June 2012, Art in America