W Magazine, A Fall Must-Read
Alta, A Fall Most Anticipated Read
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
“This third novel from Davey Davis is also their best, which is saying something—their previous books, The Earthquake Room and X, were both marvels . . . Davis’ writing is nothing short of beautiful, and the book is unsparing but compassionate. Novels this great don’t come around very often.” —Michael Schaub, NPR
“Intoxicating writing—a banger on every page.” —Maggie Lange, W Magazine
“A story that digs unflinchingly into the intimacy of both sex and illness . . . Davis’s characters are so haunted by the past that it often becomes syntactically interwoven with the present . . . Casanova 20 achieves this interjectory effect, punching through the well-charted terrains of sex, death, art, pleasure, and beauty with hedonistically lived-in details and incisive observations that rub the reader right up against the skin and the bedpan.” —Annie Lou Martin, The Whitney Review
“It would be unwise . . . to miss out on this one.” —Calvin Kasulke, Literary Hub
“A fascinating narrative of art and desire.” —Sophia Stewart, The Millions
“The novel’s conceit is big, its prose attention-grabbing, its sexual joie de vivre propulsive, but, in the end, the most compelling part is the tender nuance of its central characters as they love both each other and the world. The result is a rare gem of a book—afraid of neither joy nor sorrow and patient enough to find the human heart inside all its gorgeous language. A show-stopping novel that carries within it a quiet, steadfast heart.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[T]his ethereal work holds the reader’s attention.” —Publishers Weekly
“Casanova 20 is another stunner from one of the great writers of haunting fiction for our violent, sick, sometimes beautiful world. Davis has written a melancholy, lonely, fully embodied novel about art and desire and the self and how people get through. I was spellbound by every page of this uneasy and utterly surprising book.” —Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
“Davey Davis is a master of moods, beauty rippling into unease like—as in one of Davis’s own metaphors—a firework display reflected on dark and shifting water.” —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“Enrapturing, entrancing dual narrative about bodily betrayals both real and imagined, fixation, neurosis, beauty, charisma, hotness, youth, death, impermanence, needs, wants, desire, regret, being proactive, being a vector, asking and not asking for what you actually want, and being and not being gay—sometimes at the same time!” —Harron Walker, author of Aggregated Discontent
“What if you were unbearably hot for your entire life and one day, without warning, it stopped? One half of Davey Davis’s third novel, Casanova 20 explores one straight man’s grief over this conundrum, while the other side plays the story of an older gay painter watching his mother, sister, and then himself succumb to an unexplained but fatal illness. These two men’s lives braid into each other while the world experiences the mass upheaval and grief of the covid pandemic. Davis is, as always, sharp and unexpected, even as they dig into themes around sex and illness that have infused their prior novels X and the earthquake room. Personally, I can’t wait to see how some readers will misread the characters in this one—particularly the question of Adrian’s sexuality and how to categorize the intimacy between the two leads. As with everything else in the novel, the answers are both straightforward and mysterious. It turns out twink death can happen to straights, too.” —Morgan M. Page, cowriter of Framing Agnes and Boys Don’t Cry
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