‘Istanbul has Orhan Pamuk, Bombay had Suketu Mehta... It could be that Johannesburg was built for Vladislavić to slice and reassemble in heartfelt little pieces. A masterful form of reportage of life spent seeing… feeling.'
     – Bongani Madondo

‘Johannesburg’s existence is, as Ivan Vladislavić demonstrates in this poignant book, a daily moral challenge... To live in Johannesburg is to face constantly questions over right and wrong and to reckon always with the choice between ethical living and moral indifference. A city both beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, happy and miserable, Johannesburg works on the nerves the way a war zone might; it exacts a heavy psychic toll on those who call it home. Yet, as Vladislavić writes in some of the most moving prose ever written about this former mining town, people live here, they make lives here. What a chronicle of a city in perpetual crisis.’
     – Jacob Dlamini

‘An elegant, gentle, bitter-sweet ramble through the streets of Johannesburg with the incomparable Vladislavić.’
     – Jonny Steinberg

‘A bewitching meditation. A raw, literary, and heart-felt ode to life.’
     – Andrew Harding

‘At times charming, at times entertaining, at times heartbreaking… an extraordinary book.’              
     – Michelle Constant, SAFM

‘Vladislavić is distinctive for his ability to muck about, far more productively than most writers, with the line between fiction and non-fiction... Being a city walker, Vladislavić is a master of the detour, the sidetrack, the cul de sac. Indeed, though his walking is purposeful (and habitual) like his writing, it is also (like his writing), meandering, tangential, as likely to take the longer, more interesting way around as it is to find the useful shortcut. He is alive to the “congruence between walking … story and song, history and prophecy, remembering and hoping”.Reading his work means taking unexpected turns, and making odd and fascinating discoveries… Vladislavić is, like the camera, on the hunt, observing without discriminating… the book demonstrates Vladislavić’s ability to make the mundane both funny and inexpressibly sad…  
     One has a sense, reading this terrible, familiar tale, that The Near North may have been written in part to exorcise it. Except that Vladislavić never lingers on the spectacular and never, ever seeks cheap emotional responses. Uncannily, this quality of his writing – his extraordinary thrift – is precisely what makes things linger in the mind, what moves one. Vladislavić does not tell us the meanings of these things (the small stories, the life-altering ones), but we are nonetheless grateful that, like the linkman, he is carrying the light as we hasten for home.’
     – Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, The Conversation

‘The Near North has the febrile, hallucinatory feel of JG Ballard’s earlier apocalyptic novels, but tempered and made gentle by a Proustian attention to the ordinary... Many South Africans will recognise this flowery description as essentially the condition of existence in our country today. We are living in a constant state of crisis, so we need to hold on to those rituals of existence that allow us to keep going… the story’s arc, and the way the book describes the slow whittling away at our civil society that has taken place over the last few decades, does serve to emphasise some of the moral contradictions South Africans have had to learn to deal with… The warning is clear.’
     – Chris Roper, Daily Maverick

‘To accompany Ivan Vladislavić as he makes his way through the streets of Johannesburg is to be filled at once with delight and an overwhelming saudade for a city that has undergone staggering changes. Taking on multiple identities for the diverse populations that call it home, our once-thriving metropolis is teetering on the brink of a catastrophic infrastructure crisis… In The Near North, Vladislavić reprises his role of the modern-day flâneur, wandering the streets and musing on incidences of decay and rebirth… Our mad, bad Joburg is notoriously difficult to live in, yet many people love it. This enigmatic affection permeates Vladislavić’s writing… [This is] a masterwork of profound insight and quiet strength. Both deeply personal and broadly sweeping, moving between household crises and public spectacles, it is playfully funny and ironic, yet intensely earnest in detailing the brokenness of Vladislavić’s beloved city.’
     – Monique Verduyn, Business Day