"Statovci’s writing...has an affecting lyricism.... [Containing] at its best, longing and rage compressed in a single sentence at once sweepingly plangent and rooted in granular detail.... Crossing, in its rejection of fixed notions of identity, has a kind of kinship with recent books by other young queer writers, among them Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl...and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater.... Crossing arrives at a moment when many of us have grown suspicious of monolithic categories...and have begun to recognize how inadequate such labels are to encompass the reality of individual lives. The novel memorably portrays the pain those labels can cause.” (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker)

“Poignant.... Powerful.... [A] searching tale of a young Albanian whose struggle to understand his sexual orientation and gender identity is interwoven with his struggle to survive in foreign lands.” (Booklist)

“Reading Pajtim Statovci’s fiction is like entering a lucid dream: life and death intertwines in an intimate dance; the nostalgia for the past is akin to the nostalgia for the future. Crossing is a novel that dazzles and mesmerizes, and the reader, upon finishing, may have the extraordinary sensation that his or her own dreams have been scattered along the journey, beckoning for rereading.” (Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End)