Brilliant... profoundly affecting. It broke my heart at the awfulness of humankind and the cruelty with which we treat each other, but it also made my heart sing that there is such love and compassion in the world too. A beautiful story.

The trajectories of these lone rail travellers, and others they meet, ricochet like snooker balls across this absorbing novel, almost entirely set in the comic wonderland of the English rail network.

Mulligan’s prose…delivers a strong human story with impressive skill

Imaginative and challenging… Train Man is his [Mulligan’s] first foray into adult fiction… Carefully crafted and with an undertow of melancholy, Train Man is reminiscent of Nick Hornby’s high-concept scenarios and deceptively light touch with human tragedy

Beautifully written… [and] at times even made me laugh out loud

Propulsive . . . brilliantly vivid . . . stays in the mind long after reading

Absolutely brilliant . . . touchingly captures the awkward, aching longing of a misfit . . . darkly funny

Wonderfully shocking . . . a stunning, original debut.

Fundamentally intimate . . . beguiling . . . A novel about being normal that is anything but.

Terrific... astute, tender, raw... very funny

elevating the ordinary with luscious prose . . . [Tennis Lessons] gives us the magical ability of seeing this tired old world with brand new eyes. What an invaluable gift, and what a beautiful book.

Gently comic and compassionate

Recalling the grotesque of Christine Schutt and Deborah Levy, Susannah Dickey’s Tennis Lessons is an achingly vital novel, a work of blood and flesh, convulsing in the heat of mortality.

Dickey scorchingly captures the awkward, aching longing of a misfit...shot through with honesty

So compelling . . . darkly funny . . . a powerful account of a girl becoming a woman.

A fresh-eyed read. It's funny and honest, brutally so, and every so often sneaks up and punches you right in the guts. It's the kind of book you read in one furious sitting, then find yourself mulling over for weeks to come. Susannah Dickey's got a strange and sublime way of seeing the world.

Tennis Lessons is a singular creation - a vivid, funny, emotionally intelligent dissection of an ordinary life.

Effective and pacy.

"A dictionary as an unreliable narrator" is a device used here in clever ways ... Those familiar with Williams's writing won't be surprised to find that her characters are also in love with words ... Williams's sentences rarely stall; they move between conventional and innovative forms, and her novel is no less original for that.

The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams (William Heinemann), which continues the lexicographical playfulness of her short stories, is a singularly charming jeu d'esprit about two people a century apart doing the difficult, essential work of defining words and defining themselves.

[I]t's a sunny, breezy smile of a book [...] it's a lovely, lovely book which we read in a single sitting. If you liked The Surgeon of Crowthorne or even Leonard and Hungry Paul we think you'll get an almighty kick out of this. Max Porter described Williams' debut Attrib, thus "I love it in a way I usually reserve for people" - we feel the same way about The Liar's Dictionary.

With its historical and contemporary settings, rounded relatable characters, and a plot to which one could even give spoilers, [...] The Liar's Dictionary is recognisably a Proper Novel. [...] The tricky courtship of word and world, and how a book might hold a world, is essentially the theme of all dictionary fiction. The Liar's Dictionary, an invaluable additionto that odd canon, ends up - I think - being all about one word, one that James Joyce (an encyclopaediac himself) called "the word known to all," the word love.

[A] wry, charming debut novel ... Ruminating on and revelling in the English language, this warm-hearted novel is a thoughtful, funny delight.

If searching for the answers to human uncertainties by crystallising them in definitions is 'like trapping butterflies under glass,' the beating of Williams' words against the pages is anything but: these words are playfully free.

Filled with humour and sparkling moments of insight, it's a book that celebrates the delights of language whilst the characters struggle to find their place in the world that exists beyond word definitions.