A truly captivating work of immense power and beauty

Haunting, moving, beautifully written

A rich, sensual novel... This is a novel that gives voice to the invisible, the untouchable, the abused and the damaged, weaving their painful songs into a thing of beauty.

One of the best writers in the world today

Shafak is the most exciting Turkish novelist to reach western readers in years

A terrific book. Poetic, poignant, trenchant

A thoughtful, charming book that offers a connection to other worlds, perspectives and possibilities

A brave and passionate novel

A vivid carnival of life and death, cruelty and kindness, love, politics and deep humanity. This is only possible in the hands of a consummate storyteller. Elif Shafak's lyrical command of language and narrative is breathtaking. Brilliant!

Elif Shafak brings into the written realm what so many others want to leave outside. Spend more than ten minutes and 38 seconds in this world of the estranged. Shafak makes a new home for us in words

Elif Shafak's extraordinary Ten Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World is a work of brutal beauty and consummate tenderness, a wild shout of life from out of the lower depths of destitution and prostitution, indeed from beyond the grave itself. Every page throbs with unruly vitality, the sense- saturating colours scents and sounds of raw Istanbul, all registered with poetic sharpness. It's a book which for all its ordeals is a profoundly moving, at times lyrical, celebration of humanity's obstinate fight for life against the steepest of odds

A heartbreaking meditation on the ways in which social forces can destroy a life. Elif Shafak can be unsparing, lyrical, political, intimate... Several novels live in this one, and all of them are moving, generous and elegantly written

Watson is fascinating on the ins and outs of memory, and paces his story with mesmerising expertise.

[Broken Ghost is] brim-full of such lovely stuff, though all leavened by an almost biblical anger at the ruptured, fractured state of things, Griffiths balancing such opposing forces in a writing style muscular enough to wrestle you to the ground and leave you panting.

This exceptional debut is not for the faint-hearted… An honest account of an escalating situation and a woman’s bravery in speaking out

As a meditation the trauma of rape, Price’s debut is compelling and thought-provoking… the darker the narrative grows, the more brightly Price’s prose glimmers

What Red Was introduces an exciting new voice to fiction… Narratives are cleverly interwoven to create a richly textured whole. The writing is polished, wise and possessed of remarkable emotional intelligence. Price is just 26; I cannot wait to see what she produces next

This debut is incredibly wrought, smartly written and very, very timely… powerful

Impressive

Alcoholism, strained friendship and trauma, as well as the power of storytelling, are all sharply expressed

Feel the sharp edge of Price’s prose… capturing the horrendously common nature of rape…is Price’s greatest accomplishment

A scorching and original read... The story of a young girl whose life is torn apart

An exceptionally accomplished debut novel with strongly drawn characters. It is nuanced, true to life and it will make you burn with rage. Price has not shied away from tackling challenging material here: consent, sexual assault, substance abuse, self-harm and depression are just some of the topics that she deftly examines

Unputdownable... A powerful and haunting tale of friendship, privilege and abuse

This outstanding debut novel explore the aftermath of trauma as well as class, addiction and family dynamics

What Red Was is an impressively successful debut... if you are looking for a gripping yet thought-provoking read which will have you hooked from the first page, look no further than What Red Was

A gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal

A gripping portrait of four young women in South Korea... its focus on the tangled and complicated nature of female friendship is universally familiar and fascinating

Hypnotising... you won't want to put it down until the very last page

You'll find sisterhood at the heart of this ambitious book

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller