When I finished Sara Baume’s new novel I immediately felt sad that I could not send it in the post to the late John Berger. He, too, would have loved it and found great joy in its honesty, its agility, its beauty, its invention. Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.

A fascinating portrait of an artist’s breakdown in rural Ireland … a remarkable ability to generate narrative pace while eschewing plot, making it enough for the reader to observe a mind observing the world … it’s fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator’s mind … Art may also require a willingness to question the ordinary that is incompatible with conventional criteria of sanity. One of the most radical aspects of this novel is its challenge to received wisdom about mental illness … There are no answers here, but there is a reminder of the beauty that can be found when you allow yourself to look slowly and sadly at the world.

After a remarkable and deservedly award-winning debut, here is a novel of uniqueness, wonder, recognition, poignancy, truth-speaking, quiet power, strange beauty and luminous bedazzlement. Once again, I’ve been Baumed.

Extraordinarily compelling … What makes it so gripping as that the reader is trapped in Frankie’s mind as much as she is; every tiny detail is magnified into metaphysical significance that she cannot understand and that the reader cannot parse … Frankie’s surreal and yet understandable mind-patterns are eloquent as well as awful … On the dust-jacket Joseph O’Connor says that Baume is a ‘writer touched by greatness.’ I think she is bruised by it.

Unflinching, at times uncomfortable, and always utterly compelling, A Line Made By Walking is among the best accounts of grief, loneliness and depression that I have ever read. Every word of it rings true, the truth of hard-won knowledge wrested from the abyss. Shot through with a wild, yearning melancholy, it is nevertheless mordantly witty. It felt, to me, kindred to Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: not just on a superficial level, a young woman seeking solace in art, but in the urgent depth of its quest to understand and articulate what it means to make art, and what art might mean for the individual, lost and lonely; how it might bring us out of, or back to, ourselves.

This is, explicitly, a book about art and “sadness”, but it is neither affected nor mawkish … This is the challenge that Baume has evidently set herself – to find a fresh perspective – and she has excelled ... Baume’s is an immensely sensitive balancing act of a book, one that declines to resolve its tensions. Towards its conclusion, Frankie muses on how her odyssey ought to “end in a substantial event”. The adjective is strikingly ironic in view of Baume’s actual denouement, and further evidence of just how carefully calibrated this original and affecting novel is.

A Line Made by Walking is a profound, ruminative study of a young woman who takes photographs of dead animals … A Line Made by Walking is self-interrogating autofiction plus art criticism in a distinctly Irish mode: Sara Baume has as much in common with, say, Maggie Nelson as she does with Edna O’Brien … Brilliantly understated reflections on art and life.

Baume’s mixing of the visual arts and fiction is as satisfying as Ali Smith’s … [a] raw-nerved and wonderful novel.

This is a masterclass in the power of prose … A brilliant work that will likely resonate with anyone who’s ever felt a little lost in their twenties and beyond.

Baume’s conceit is imaginative and well organised, her writing pellucid and open.

What emerges is both a focused portrait of one woman in crisis and a beautiful mediation on universal frailty ... Another thrillingly original novel that more than live[s] up to the bar set by Spill Simmer Falter Wither.

Sara’s prose begins to crackle with the textures and scents of rural Ireland … elegant writing and unusual observations.

This tour-de-force follow-up to Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a celebration of the extraordinary in the everyday, and Baume’s prose elevates the ordinary and finds inspiration in the strange.

[B]eautifully drawn … Baume’s writing is lyrical and immensely readable … [S]he is, in fact, the everywoman of her generation.

There’s an effortless profundity to Baume’s writing that never once draws attention to itself but rather quietly reminds you how terribly sad the world can be.

As tender and luminous as her debut.

Baume’s writing is lyrical and immensely readable ... [her] portrait of a conflicted young woman is heart-wrenchingly real on every page.

A refreshing take on the genre, a semi-autobiographical retreat novel about finding something to live for not in nature but in art.

With this inventive and fascinating new novel Baume proves that she is the master of describing the intense poignancy of solitude within a noise-drenched world.

Baume achieves the feat of making a book about depression, alienation and other cheerful subjects deeply absorbing and, ultimately uplifting. She does this through the elegant lucidity of her prose, the sharp truth of her insights and the wry humour that arise from her character’s associative mind.

A masterclass in the power of prose that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt lost.

Baume’s writing is distinguished by remarkable precision and lucidity

A compelling story, finely written and forensic in its search for truth... This account of one family's tragedy is a haunting story that lingers long in the memory

An example of masterful storytelling

With each novel Ryan gets better, and this moving and quietly insistent work is his best yet.

You can sense his compassion in the bones of his work

Devastating and masterful

A hugely affecting, moving read. I was heartbroken by the end, but adored every chapter

Beautiful

Each section displays Ryan’s range as a writer... [he] writes with brilliant empathy.

Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose.

Heartbreaking … Arguably the best of the new wave of Irish writers to have emerged over the last decade

Ryan has the gift of ventriloquism - he inhabits his fictional creations thoroughly, enveloping you in their worlds

Sublime

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan made me laugh and cry and forced me to look strangers in the eye

Beautifully bleak and characterised by his remarkable ability to write about grief and common humanities.

Beautiful, compassionate

Superlatives wouldn’t do for describing From a Low and Quiet Sea … understated, and gloriously heart rendering

Strout turns her clear, incisive gaze on the intricacies and betrayals of small town life

Anything is Possible is predictably great because it's written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable - because it is written by Elizabeth Strout