Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply intelligent Broken Ghost, combines myth, drug culture and iconoclastic political vision in a wild music that’s also a call to arms. This important book outstrips even its own virtuoso literary technique.

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights...This important novel comes from a tradition: from the green fuse of Dylan Thomas...The result, though, is something new, a profane, passionate response to nature and to the countryside, which is rarely encountered in contemporary British fiction any more.

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Niall Griffiths has, like Kelman, crafted a sophisticated literary voice for the kind of people routinely dismissed not even as old-school proletarians but as a worthless “feral underclass”… It rewards us with soaring lyricism, the bite and drive of its vernacular voices, and the recurrent search for “something transcendent” in natural beauty, in human love, in the rapture of consciousness itself, in the ancient rhythms and cycles of the land.

Pairing Irvine Welsh’s demotic vim with the conspiratorial frisson of a David Peace novel, Broken Ghost is strange and compelling.

Griffiths’s novel poses some fascinating questions…[Broken Ghost’s] exploration of the unfulfilled dreams of an underclass of drug addicts and single mothers is intelligent and challenging.

Griffiths submerges the reader in a prosaic world of benefit investigations, bare-knuckle boxing, and watching Jeremy Kyle with Diamond White cider… Griffiths’s novel is an unusual mix of political and mystical, lifted by the possibility…of social transformation.

[Griffiths has an] astonishing ability to downshift from an unsentimental and lyrical evocation of the natural world to the seamy and sordid rendering of the basest of human interaction… Broken Ghost is about what seeps out at the periphery when the centre is rotten.

In Broken Ghost he [Griffiths] has produced what will surely turn out to be one of the most important and engaging novels in post-Brexit British literature.

Broken Ghost succeeds through its unflinching approach. It is a tempestuous journey of recovery and decay all the way up to the despotism of its harrowing finish which serves as a wrenching reminder that the prelude of the dystopian tomorrow is today.

[Broken Ghosts] revels in the unpleasant truth of how profane people really are… thoroughly political… Griffiths wants the reader to feel ostracized from the characters to the same extent that the characters feel ostracized from wider society.

A glittering and ferocious portrait of our time… wonderfully angry, funny, involving … Broken Ghost by Niall Griffiths…is a bitter and sparkling masterpiece.

Broken Ghost is a bleak, uplifting, angry, magical, heartbreaking book in which people keep on trying to be the best they can be despite a world designed to provoke them otherwise. Griffiths' brilliant novel is by some distance my fiction highlight of 2019.

[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