Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles, the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary.

For us, satire is merely being rude about people, in the manner of Private Eye or Spitting Image. For Pope, satire meant not only denigrating some values, but suggesting what other values might stand in their place: George II is an idiot, but a good monarch would support the arts and literature as the emperor Augustus did. The key to Pope's art is the ideal of balance, and it is a mistake to isolate one moment without seeing how he brings a counter-element into play.... On a larger scale, Pope often uses an alternative way of thinking to create what later thinkers would call an epiphany.

[A] harrowing piece of autofiction… History of Violence is a slim but densely layered novel that begins with raw urgency.

[A] heartbreaking novel… I find myself captivated by Édouard Louis's books and his raw honesty.

An intense and uncomfortably thrilling book, which uses the harrowing events of that Christmas Eve as a basis for a wider exploration of class, race and individualism... a novel that is unflinching in its examination of class and discrimination.

[Louis] writes with this amazing honesty and fantastically uncensored, brutal, beautiful clarity.

A painful and astonishing book, it tells the story of that night and its aftermath with ruthless poise and clinical precision… With almost superhuman compassion and moral courage, Louis traces the origins of Reda’s suffering by reconstructing his father’s story.

History of Violence…pack[s] total immersion and cool detachment into a single page. As translator, Lorin Stein keeps faith with its rawness — and its refinement.

[A] provocative, incendiary and stunning second book.

Once more, Édouard Louis has given us something unique; a book so direct, shocking and moving it is like holding live fire in one's hands as the pages turn. Like all great writers, he shows us something of the self so that we might better understand something of the world.

In this moving autobiographical novel . . . Louis's visceral story captures the overwhelming emotional impact and complicated shame of surviving sexual assault.

A sharp, lucid meditation on how violence perpetuates itself in communities—by engendering fear, and then cruelty.

Authentic, epic, and wonderfully Arthurian.

Kristian is one of the finest storytellers in the genre . . . this is a novel that you feel as much as you read. What we end up with is utterly staggering . . . Giles has surpassed the Cornwell trilogy in a single title.

Fiercely beautiful and gripping.

It’s difficult to think of any author more gifted to retell Lancelot’s story than Giles Kristian . . . [he] writes so beautifully. He brings these post-Roman years so vividly to life. I love the way in which the recent Roman past haunts this landscape. There is myth here, there is the Druid Merlin, and we’re reminded of many of the famous Arthurian legends, such as Excalibur, but Giles Kristian evokes a time rooted in history and in the land around us even now . . . his writing comes closest to the feeling, mood and beauty of the Old and Middle English verse that I love so much . . . there is power here, deep expression and enormous feeling. I cried and cried as the story ended in the only way it could.

This is a story that is packed full of imagery and meaning. Kristian’s prose is unique – stunningly beautiful without ever feeling overdone . . . a wonderfully textured story from a perspective I had never encountered before. Truly masterful storytelling.

Reading this beautiful novel, I felt I was watching a brilliant mind invent new tools for thinking. Sheila Heti wrings revelation from the act of asking, again and again, in ever more challenging and innovative ways, impossible questions of existence. Motherhood is a thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving book.

I read this novel more quickly and eagerly than any I've read in ages. Sheila Heti's simple, elegant sentences invariably give pleasure; her thinking is incisive and wholly original as she grapples with the kind of unhappiness that many of us, myself included, prefer to distract ourselves from rather than look at squarely. Reading Motherhood forced me to become a little more honest with myself.

Here it finally is. A book for all of you who are considering having a baby, who had a baby, who didn’t have a baby, who didn’t want a baby, who don’t know what they want but the clock is ticking anyway. This topic is finally tackled as if it were the most important decision in your life. Because, um. How lucky are we that one of our foremost thinkers took this upon herself, for years, in real time, wrestling every day and living to tell. So fucking ready to live in the world this book will help make. Read and discuss, discuss, discuss.

With each of her novels, Sheila Heti invents a new novel form. Motherhood is a riveting story of love and fate, a powerful inspiration to reflect, and a subtle depiction of the lives of contemporary women and men, by an exceptional artist in the prime of her powers. Motherhood constitutes its own genre within the many-faceted novel of ideas. Heti is like no one else.

I think of Motherhood as a beautiful, natural, living thing - a rare tree in the car-filled parking lot of literature, offering aesthetic and sustainable pleasures while also bristling with multiple, helpful, compassionate functions in the world. The high stakes, complexity, intensity, playfulness, seriousness, and inter-dimensionality of Motherhood's synthesis of art and life, of the imagination and the universe, makes me excited about both life and literature. I recommend reading and rereading Motherhood.

Motherhood is a gesture towards honesty, bringing much that was dark into light. The book makes it more possible to think the decision, but also to dream, embody and feel it.

A celebration of life, expressed poignantly through her prose - which is playful, funny, ultimately moving.

[This] novel is astonishing

I found it totally addictive and read it [Motherhood] in one go

A thoughtful, frank novel... Intellectual yet conversational, it's a meditation on responsibility and freedom, and the purpose of life itself. I found it extremely moving

The Mars Room offers a rare combination of admirably sure-footed sentences and a character and plot that made me stay up far too late. Romy’s situation is unbearable, and almost unbearably realised, but the writing is so very good and the ideas so expertly handled that it’s a great pleasure to read in all its devastation.

Written with the absorbing specificity and scope that have established Kushner as one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists in the country... A novel of great urgency and devastation.

The Mars Room is mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful -- from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back.

In smart, determined, and vigilant Romy, Kushner, an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity… This is a gorgeously eviscerating novel of incarceration writ large… Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner’s dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free.

Heartbreaking and unforgettable… [The Mars Room] deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written.

Any book by literary darling Rachel Kushner will be highly anticipated, and The Mars Room is no exception... a bleak, affecting read.

A searing look at life on the margins… This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch… gripping.

Stunning… The Mars Room follows a woman, separated from her young son, who is serving two consecutive life sentences in a women’s correctional facility in California. A gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison.

Utterly convincing… the fictions [Kushner] creates have the certainty of fact.

Kushner is a masterful world-creator, and her accomplishment here is unparalleled.

Kushner’s great gift is for the evocation of a scene, a time and place, and the atmosphere.

The Mars Room is the darkly comic, tragically poignant tale of a stripper turned convict and the life that awaits her behind bars.

Kushner creates immersive histories of frayed lives from the criminal demi-monde.

While Rachel Kushner's latest book doesn't pull any punches, her prose is so witty and surreal that I couldn't help tearing through... I loved it.

Spiked with gallows humour from Romy's cell mates, [The Mars Room] is a seamy snapshot of life behind bars, served with a full-throated gusto.

Placing culturally marginalised voices centre stage to explode open a world many of us know little about... [The Mars Room] left me in tears.

Crushing... A powerful, tragic novel.

[A] visceral portrait of prison life

The charm and wit of the incarcerated people in The Mars Room shines in Kushner's prose

A mysterious portrait of contemporary America and life on its margins... for fans of "Orange Is The New Black".

A very compelling read… hilarious and depressing and rage-inducing in equal measures.

Absorbing.

Lyrical, bleakly comic and, ultimately, intensely affecting

It is a necessary and compelling book, and this year’s must read

Rachel Kushner’s exhaustive research into what goes on within these walls

Kushner’s high-definition, high-impact prose is as electrifying as it is daring

The momentum of the novel resides in its prose, the spring and sass of a voice so vivid it can largely dispense with the mechanics of plot

A salty and hilarious novel from one of America's best living novelists.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room should be a favourite [to win the Man Booker Prize]. If you like your escapism as gritty as it gets, prepare to be hooked by this unflinching account of a female prisoner serving a double life sentence... The Mars Room is rarely easy reading, but the furore of voices and violence and injustice throws you right into the story and keeps you immersed there.

Kushner’s novel is a timely reminder that a country’s authoritarian tendencies can be most easily measured by the number of people it deems unworthy of freedom

Rachel Kushner knows how to sniff out a good character.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room immerses you in the life of a high-security women’s prison in California, its central character Romy – accused of killing her stalker – both gritty and fragile. This was not a subject I thought would grip me, but in Kushner’s firm hands I was entranced. Much of the book is autobiographical – while never in prison herself, Kushner was the daughter of Beatniks and allowed to roam the dodgier areas of San Francisco as a teenager. The characters range from bullet-headed killers to a well-meaning male teacher whose ambiguities are brilliantly done. Romy’s trans friend Conan, “shoulders as broad as the aisle, and a jawline beard”, is delightfully free of the politically correct, while the style veers excitingly from straight narrative to scribbled lists like whimpers of despair.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room was a hot favourite on this year's Booker shortlist, and it's easy to see why… Kushner's atmospheric writing is compelling to the last.

Kushner’s writing is the most marvellous I read this year… time and again I found myself rereading paragraphs of The Mars Room for her perfectly turned sentences, the music of her prose