What a warm joy of strangeness this novel is! Teeming with whip-smart literary and pop cultural doublings, triplings, echoes, and parallels, As the Ceiling Flew Away is a richly humorous dive into the delights of language. Indeed-all torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement inhabits here.

Sean Bernard,

author of Studies in the Hereafter

At once irreverent and heartfelt, Kevin Allardice's As the Ceiling Flew Away offers a richly textured portrait of an imaginary island nation and a wholly human narrator. Leonard Nist navigates relationships, immigration bureaucracy, and theatrical longings in a manner that is both maddening and delightful-his voice playfully dexterous even in the toughest of circumstances. The result is a novel that is splendidly unique.

Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria

A marvelously offbeat, funny, irrepressible, endlessly inventive story of art and life. With philosophical mischief and earnest impiety, this island tale, like its Shakespearean antecedents, asks deep questions about where the rehearsal and performance of our existence trespasses into the thing itself.

Greg Jackson, author of Prodigals