Wickedly funny

If a widening grin is the test of a novel's entertainment value in retrospect, A Good Man in Africa romps home

A delight

Uproariously funny

Exuberant, bursting at the seams in delightful ways... Evaristo continues to expand and enhance our literary canon. If you want to understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read

An exceptional book that unites poetry, social history, women's voices and beyond. Order it right now

Evaristo's prose hums with life as characters seem to step off the page fully formed. At turns funny and sad, tender and true, this book deserves to win awards

Brims with vitality

With this rich composition, Evaristo deserves a toast

Masterful... A choral love song to black womanhood in modern Great Britain

'Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination.

Threads together the diverse life stories of 12 black British women in ways that deliberately resist categorisation

Such a satisfying read, funny and true, the characters are so real you feel you know them already

A warm, humorous and ambitious novel, and one that is enjoyably playful in style. It is both a product of its time and unlike any book ever written about Britain

My favorite book of 2019 . . . the most absorbing book I read all year. This novel is a master class in storytelling. It is absolutely unforgettable. When I turned the final page, I felt the ache of having to leave the world Evaristo created but I also felt the excitement of getting to read the book all over again. It should have won the Booker alone. It deserves all the awards and then some.

'Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo is the best book in recent years to have embodied the idea that there are as many ways to be joyful as there are to be Black. Polyphonic and nuanced, it celebrates the lives of Black British women rather than commiserating with them, which is a crucial - and rare - distinction.'

It is hard to believe that such beautiful but controlled writing could come from a debut author, but The Spinning Heart is just that. Each chapter is narrated by a unique voice from one member of an Irish community, building by the end of this slim novel a precise and fully formed portrait of the devastation of the financial crash on both a personal, private and public level. It is full of warmth and wit, but is also a haunting and a complex story. There’s murder, adultery, scamming and gossiping, alongside love and heartbreak, in this perceptive gem of a novel.

[A] gem of a novel. With a sure sense of place, and a convincing portrayal of life lived at the edgy margins, it vividly plots the landscape of the heart en route to a gripping and ultimately redemptive finale.

Raw and redemptive.

Gripping and beautiful.

Ryan's third novel is an elegant, unflinching, entirely brilliant look at the waywardness of desire. . . . searing honesty that is raw but utterly riveting.

A powerful story that will pull you into a whirlwind of emotion and pain, but also the faintest glimmer of hope.

Shines through its female characters.

A stunning story that deserves great success.

All We Shall Know blew me away, left me blubbering on my commute and wide awake at 2 a.m. . . . He excels at first-person narrative, and it's this that makes All We Shall Know unforgettable.

An intense, dramatic story . . . rather touching.

His best yet . . . I kept re-reading paragraphs and whole pages to savour Ryan's remarkable prose. The book imbues profanity with poetry, and the characters, for all their flaws, are beautifully and sympathetically drawn.

Unflinching.

A wonderful novel.

In a word, this book is stunning.

McEwan muses on love, empathy and the morality and ethics of artificial intelligence… very good.

An important literary contribution to the AI debate, one of the great questions of our time.

Precisely rendered and well observed… [McEwan] neatly delineates humanity’s remorseless self-demotion from the centre of the universe to flotsam.

[An] undeniably another excellent novel from McEwan, who demonstrates that he can conjure up challenging characters, witty dialogue and moral ambiguity when dealing with sex robots just as brilliantly as he does on literary turf.

Dexterous, utterly gripping and intensely thought-provoking.

Deeply unnerving… What starts out as a darkly funny ménage à trois becomes an unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever.

The latest novel from my favourite author tackles the subjects of artificial intelligence and what it is to be human. He does this in a surprising, original way, and Adam, the strong, seductive “robot”, is a character that will haunt me for a long time.

[This] new, gripping, beautifully written and constructed, disturbing, and provocative novel…is a thrilling read… the chilling conclusions that hyper-rationalism can come to are brilliantly described.

McEwan maintains his status as a master of fiction.

A new collection of stories that explores the complex - and often darkly funny - connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

Ian McEwan’s sublimely playful new novel transports you back to the Eighties but with some major changes, including eerily life-like robots… Dark and slyly funny, it’ll also give your brain a workout.