"In this enthralling tale of vocation, discovery, and love … Kerangal balances the gloriously sensuous with the deeply reflective in an exquisite and omniscient streaming narration … resplendently evocative and exhilarating."
—Booklist

"There is something magnificently true about De Kerangal’s fiction, which braids technical fluency with winged prose … As she has so often done, [she] shows there is poetry to be found in our jargon, and stories embedded in our tools."
—The Guardian

"As she did with The Cook, award-winning French author de Kerangal offers stunning portraiture suffused with the joy and meaning of work."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"The book is a joyful testament to the rigours of research, and to the translator's art, too. To have captured the excitement of those rolling, propulsive sentences – to make them more than a cut-and-paste from a thesaurus – is a wonderful achievement on the part of Jessica Moore."
—Times Literary Supplement

"It’s very hard to translate the essence of one artistic medium into another. But de Kerangal manages the trick here, following the career of a painter and rendering her search for mastery of a craft in such a way that it reveals the author in full control of her own. Like her earlier novels ... Painting Time doesn’t just use paintings to further a story, or as a pretext for enlivening a bit of history. It’s a novel about the creative process itself."
—Bloomberg

"[An] excellent translation, pulled off with sensitivity, empathy and … beautiful writing."
—The New European

"de Kerangal provides great insight about the alchemy involved in becoming an artist … we get the sense of being nudged toward an understanding of the ‘grace and vacuity that grazes genius.’”
—M.A.C. Farrant, Vancouver Sun