LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Debut novelist Lerner is a television producer and journalist who has covered the African genocides firsthand. His amazingly balanced insights into the continent’s unceasing tribal wars,
and his depiction of a couple whose great love is subverted by opposing worldviews has generated a page-turner."
BETH KISSILEFF
Jewish Book Council
"This is the loveliness of The Ambassadors, that the interpretation of how Jewish values and morals from the past can exist in the modern world, where Africa is as much a way this family connects as the Shoah is."
JOANNA SCOTT
PEN / Faulkner Award nominated author
of Arrogance and The Manikin
"George Lerner is a fearless writer, unflinching in his rendering of the world’s worst atrocities and achingly tender as he documents the impact of war. The family members at the heart of this book are connected through a web of emotion not just to one another but to the political events that define our time. And even with its huge historical and geographical range, this beautifully ambitious novel still manages to take us deep into the complex lives of its characters."
CHARLES BLACKSTONE
author of Vintage Attraction
"With a documentarian's depth of field and a novelist's perspicacity, George Lerner expertly and poignantly illuminates the trials of nations and the trials of the heart--and the ways in which they intersect--in this deeply gratifying, deeply resonant novel."
BOOKLIST
"an intelligent novel that tackles some complex issues."
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
Fall 2014 Preview
"The Rwandan civil war is the backdrop for a family portrait of conflicting loyalties and a search for identity."
KIRKUS REVIEWS
"A father fights genocide on the world stage...but the most riveting drama plays out much closer to home."
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
"If there's one thing the characters in George Lerner's moving novel THE AMBASSADORS can agree on it's that the world and its occupants need saving. What they can't agree on is how to do the saving. Perceptively, generously, Lerner's exact and exacting first novel reminds us that saving the world must always start at home, around our own hearths, with our own loved ones. Without that, we are surely lost. With it, we may be saved."
KAREN SHEPARD
author of The Celestials
GARY SCHANBACHER
author of Crossing Purgatory
and Migration Patterns
"In this bold and unexpectedly tender novel, George Lerner chronicles both our darkest times and our most hopeful. With the documentary eye of a journalist, he marches us across the unspeakably cruel killing fields of the 20th Century, and with the heart of a novelist, he explores the redemptive power of forgiveness and love."
ELIZABETH ESLAMI
author of Hibernate and Bone Worship
“It is easy to be awed by the The Ambassadors: by its terra incognita reach, by its sly tradecraft, by its plumb lines stretching from Brooklyn to Germany to Congo, from the buried stories of early man to the muted truths of a modern family. Like the Holbein painting from which it takes its title, this novel yields ceaseless marvels, and its author, George Lerner, is a cartographer making paths where before there was darkness.”
MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
"An amazing and impressive debut .... 'The Ambassadors' is a riveting read from beginning to end and one of those all too infrequent novels that linger in the mind long after they are finished and set back upon the shelf."