Rating: 
Summary: A mystery within a mystery ....
Review: This book may seem intimidating, clocking in at over 750 pages, but the story is sufficiently gripping to keep your nose firmly in place until the very end.While the story is a terrific set-piece, riffing on nearly every element of the Victorian novel (thieves! poverty! disguise! secret identities! lost wills!), the real brilliance of it comes with a second reading. Nearly every character in the book is lying or at the very least concealing parts of the truth, and the narrator no less than anyone else. The story works on several levels of interpretation, each more shocking and intriguing than the last. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: a gripping read
Review: I think I finished this book in under three days, I could not put it own. It was all encompassing and astoundingly acurate. It was one of those books that when it ends you experience a sort of culture shock at findng yourself back in the real world and a little let down to find yourself in more mundan settings. But read it, you won'tbe let down.
Rating: 
Summary: Good writing but a swamp of misery
Review: This hefty volume is a real page-turner--I was glued to it for about 4 days--as well as being an extraordinary tour de force. The plot is an intricate and far-flung labyrinth with unexpected twists at every turn. If you like to savor puzzles, this is a great one. It's patterned on a Victorian novel, and its scrupulously accurate descriptions of the wretched underside of Victorian society are extraordinarily vivid. Like a Dickens novel, it's populated with striking characters from all walks of life, especially the underclass. And the writing is very good. But there was one aspect that put a damper on my enjoyment and stood out as a striking anachronism for a book aspiring to Victorian novelhood. The chapters have the kind of bouncy, chirpy period titles like those I remember from the cheerful books of my youth like Little Women and they led me to expect a certain Victorian-style heartiness in the tone of the story. However, except for the first section, the rest of the novel is a story of sheer unrelieved misery, evil, and hopelessness. The author seems to have bent over backwards to systematically demolish every prospect of help or escape and eradicate any possibility of lasting happiness or hope, no matter how small. Even Dickens' grimmest novels offer comic relief, and they usually offer a ray of hope or a chance of happiness at the end for some decent character or other as well. Victorian writers lived in an optimistic era, and in the books I'm familiar with, glimmers of that optimism are generally evident in their work. (Villette is a striking exception, for those who like gloom.) It's not that I prefer saccharin endings, but in my view, the relentless blackness of the Quincunx's worldview reflects more of the sardonic mindset of a'90's novelist than it does a Victorian one. Whether this is supposed to make it more "realistic" to match the taste of contemporary readers, I don't know, but I don't think that's necessarily achieved by taking the opposite extreme in an effort to flee conventional happy endings. In any event, the novel's inexorable woefulness wore me down after a while. In the end, it left me feeling unusually depressed and also a little like I'd been had. I thought I was reading a novel that was supposed to be faithful to the spirit as well as the form of a 19th century novel, but at the end I discovered that it was actually a bit of turn-of-the-millenium nihilism tricked out in elaborate Victorian duds.
Rating: 
Summary: Palliser had a wonderful publicist
Review: Overrated completely. Too many unfortunate things I can say about this disappointing book, but I will sum it up by saying that reading this book was like watching an unnecessarily long movie with great costumes and scenic design, a decent plot, but terrible dialogue, flat characters and dreadful acting. Two stars were for the obvious research that went into it and the idea that could have been good. Can't believe that Palliser gets compared to Dickens and Collins, probably by people who have never read Dickens and Collins.
If you want to read long books that have really gripping (and believable) stories, I suggest The Counte of Monte Cristo, The Brothers Karamazov and The Woman in White to name a few. Don't waste time on this like I did.
Rating:
Summary: In the presence of genius
Review: I read this book 11 years ago and it still remains my favorite, despite having read hundreds of books since. It was one of the first books that I read that I considered pure genius. I was, and remain, blown away. While it is certainly a big book and it may take some patience to into it, it is so well written and entertaining that it is worth a little work. Once you get into the rhythm of the book it is a page turner. The descriptions of Victorian England are marvelous. For those who like the Victorian Novel this is a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Does it ever end?
Review: As some other reviewers had done, I bought this book many years ago and only recently picked it up and began reading. It took me a couple of weeks to get through it and I must say that whereas the depiction of character and scene is quite remarkable I felt that the book would never end. Not because of the length of the book (although quite considerable) but due to the fact that every time you thought a conclusion was being reached the main character was yet again captured, beaten, trapped, etc..., It reminded me of the time many years ago when I tried watching a soap opera during lunch with my wife and after 2 weeks I was driven nuts by the fact that there was never a resolution to any of the vignettes. It just went on and on and on....,
Rating:
Summary: Pure Entertainment
Review: This may be the most entertaining book I have ever read. The action never stops and the characters are well developed. The writing is of a very high quality. The descriptions of pre-Victorian and early-Victorian England are fantastic. Loved every word of it.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Big Book
Review: This book is for people who don't mind taking awhile to get INTO it, and I'm not one of those. I've tried to read this book three separate times -- the first because of wonderful reviews and the second two times after I'd read The Unburied by the same author and loved it (you can SMELL the dankness of the old buildings he talks about and feel the splinters in your feet from the sagging, leaning stairways in those buildings). I thought if Palliser could write one book that was so very good, I needed to just get into the big one and it would be very good, as well. Well, I never found that out. Never got further than probably page 100 and that was only by having skipped several pages of exposition. So my recommendation? If you like loooooooooooooong books, this may be your cup of tea, but if not, skip it, read The Unburied and maybe whatever new Palliser has in store.
Rating:
Summary: Still in my thoughts
Review: I read this book over 5 years ago and I still recommend it to friends! When I started to read Quincunx, I was having a bout of insomnia - and it was the perfect cure. Part way though, the characters and plot caught my attention and I couldn't put it down. Thank you Mr Palliser for bringing this era to life. True there are a ton of characters and the beginning is a bit slow but it is worth it.
Rating:
Summary: What we want from a novel
Review: It's a huge book with dozens of characters that submerged me completely. My only suggestion would be to include a glossary (and a few footnotes wouldn't hurt either). It's the kind of book, however, that you just can't wait to get back to reading and isn't that what we all look for in a novel?
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