The title character of Deepti Kapoor’s searing debut is dead by Line 1, but I still read A Bad Character in one frantic sitting... Intoxicating.

A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story, set against the bleak beauty and baroque decay of 21st century Delhi - its rubble, construction sites, wastelands, and the poisoned ooze of its dead river. What Twilight in Delhi is to the twentieth-century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the twenty-first: the essence of India’s corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent.

Twenty-first-century Delhi needed a voice, and here it is, in all its dark majesty. A Bad Character comes as if from nowhere: it is an alchemical marvel, a novel of stunning beauty and originality.

A Bad Character…captures [Delhi] in such perfect detail that I felt I could smell the food stalls, feel the crush of people and the heat rising from the pavements... As well as her transcendent eye for detail, the love story at the heart of this book is honest and deeply unsettling, making it a compelling read.

A fiery, incandescent debut, A Bad Character artfully captures the fragmented psyche and perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi... [Kapoor's] writing has the flexible, lyrical cadence of a prose poem... A Bad Character is a powerful, psychologically acute, elegantly crafted debut that promises great things to come from Kapoor.

The characters are interesting and the story grips, but the heart of this book is Delhi: filthy, challenging, destructive and thrillingly alive. A powerful read.

A poignant and impressionistic portrait of the end of adolescence and a changing world.

Annihilating desire laps at the edges of Deepti Kapoor's A Bad Character...offers vivid insights into what it means to be a middle-class woman in 21st-century Delhi.

Dark, sexy, magnetic, this is a grown-up coming of age story.

Beautifully describes every scent, sight and sound of Delhi… A love letter to India, while fully acknowledging its flaws... the country’s dangers and restrictions, especially for women.

A Bad Character is thrilling and intense and dark.

An intense treatise on the nature of desire and probably the best portrait of new India since Slumdog Millionaire.

The story and style are reminiscent of Marguerite Duras's The Lover, but when fused with teh vivid Delhi scenes, Kapoor's novel ventures into exciting and original territory.

The literary fiction debut of the year… the coming of age story of a 21-year-old girl from Delhi, laced with poetry, confusion, sex and drugs. A fan of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover? Get this book.

A dream-like debut that explores the dark side of Delhi...the story is quick to move, charged with the energy of a racy page-turner, and visceral in its treatment of female desire and sexuality.

Kapoor paints a vast and detailed landscape of Delhi, canvassing the city and its people, its smells and stories, its ability to harbour hope and heartbreak in the same breath. With remarkable candour, she crafts sentences that stand out for their elegance and brevity; they linger in your memory long after the last page has been turned.

The sparely elegant phrases pack a wealth of colour, smell and association, evoking the reality of a city straining at the leashes, pulsating with deviant, joyous life.

Fractured, fragmented and beautiful.

[Kapoor] writes with a keening, furious sorrow that rang in my ears well after I finished the book.

An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart, about a lost teenager in a lost England.

An upmarket take on the Gone Girl mystery.

With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England.

The whole novel is full of hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes.

One of the funniest and most inventive youngish writers of non-fiction in America… Selin’s meandering observations and gentle humour make her an engaging narrator… Batuman examines complex subjects with an appealing lightness of touch… The scene when Selin leaves the Hungarian village is surprisingly moving and encapsulates the overall effect of a novel which reminds us that dead time can be full of life.

Sweetly funny, The Idiot rejects the doctrine of omitting needless words in favour of marvelling…at the complexities of language and communication.

Charming… A gentle coming-of-age novel drawing on Batuman’s time at Harvard in the mid-1990s… It’s in such acute portrayals of early adulthood’s uncertainties that this pleasantly rambling tale leaves its most vivid impression.

A delightfully digressive campus novel.

There is more than one idiot in this delightful and slyly funny coming-of-age novel... Will strike a chord for any former fresher who felt the same way. (That would be all of us.)

Batuman, in seemingly writing a novel about nothing, has produced an incredibly complex, accurate and funny novel.

I never want to finish it, so I’m reading it very slowly.

Every page is thicketed with jokes, riffs, theories of language. It’s a portrait of an intellectual and sentimental education that offers almost unseemly pleasure.

Elif Batuman is a real writer, and should be allowed to write whatever the hell she likes.

Selin’s deadpan narration is often very funny indeed

This is a capacious book that creates an alternative world

At once clever and clueless, Batuman’s heroine shows us with just how messy it can be to forge a self

One of the best novels I read all summer... a painstakingly accurate depiction of the balancing act that is student-life. As clever as it is funny, Batuman's debut novel allows us to laugh at our own stupidity, and celebrate our own cluelessness.

The Idiot... manages the trick of being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually being a comedy. It just observers life, in all its truth and is hilarious for page after page.

I finally read The Idiot by Elif Batuman and everyone is correct, she is clearly a genius