Marvellous... Raging and elegaic

Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun... A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years

A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel

Wonderful, rich...entirely gripping

A momentous novel

Brilliantly written...angry, grieving, witty, acute...compellingly and convincingly rendered

Utterly tragic and compelling. It's one of the greatest modern American novels

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is one of those books you know is going to change you in some profound way shortly after you start reading it and it did for me. I read it last summer and nothing has quite surpassed it for me since. A very painful read.

[American Pastoral] is gorgeously written with passages of breathtaking beauty filled with wisdom and pathos

Funny and joyful

A charming story about finding your voice

A wonderfully uplifting story about female friendship and the power of standing up for what we believe in…It’s so refreshing to read a story with such well-drawn mature women at its heart

A special book by a rare writer.

Harding, who won a dark-horse Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers, again demonstrates his gifts for concision and compassion in a narrative that balances historical fact with fully drawn characters. . . . Sure to be a standout of 2023.

There is no writer alive anything like Paul Harding, and This Other Eden proves it: astonishingly beautiful, humane, strange, interested in philosophy and the heart, stunningly written. It's about home, love, heredity, cruelty, and the very nature of art, so completely original it's hard to know how to describe it in a mere blurb, by which I mean: you must read this book.

Tender, magical, and haunting, Paul Harding's This Other Eden is that rare novel that makes profound claims on our present age while being, very simply, a graceful performance of language and storytelling. Here is prose that touchingly holds its imagined island community in a light that can only be described as generous and dazzling. I have not read a novel this achingly beautiful in a while, nor one in which the fate of its characters I will not soon forget.

An exquisite book which is both intimate and epic. The writing is polished, precise, luminous. A beautiful testament to people, and whole ways of life, which are have simply been removed from history, and leave hardly a trace behind.'

A tragic tale beautifully told.

Big-hearted, generous and brimful of emotion, this is a gorgeous, life-enhancing novel.

Ryan's writing is like poetry and he has a real gift for creating characters who live in full technicolour. Highly recommend

In Ryan's hands the mundane and the everyday is transformed into a thing of beauty, thrumming with significance.

Tender with comic observation ... a topsy-turvy emotional rollercoaster

Magical

Exquisitely rendered. It reads like musical sounds, full of light and lilting melody...it's funny and sad, and sparks with the most tremendous, tart, wit.

The characters are compelling and vividly drawn, the dialogue is profane and frequently hilarious; the prose drips like honey off a spoon.

A jewel of a novel that will surely become a classic... enthralling and unmissable

A celebration of love and loyalty among women.

Big-hearted, generous and brimful of emotion, this a gorgeous, life-enhancing read

It is a beaut. It's a celebration of women and of womanhood. I see my mother in this, I see my sister ... This book is a joy.

If language - lyric, lovely and funny, steeped in County Tipperary - and women (men come and go, rarely center a chapter and are often useless, sometimes cruel) are of no interest to you, The Queen of Dirt Island is not your next read. Ryan's book is a celebration, in an embroidered, unrestrained, joyful, aphoristic and sometimes profane style, of both ... The Queen of Dirt Island gives the women their due, and the reader is rewarded.

Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island is a little Irish miracle ... there's as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write ... Ryan has his own emotional range and a way of capturing the largeness of what look like tiny lives but aren't

Frank, funny and emotional

A fascinatingly realistic look into the world of elite sports where driven and flawed characters' private lives are just as intriguing and controversial as they are on the court

This is a well-researched, exciting and genuinely tender book

McEwan is on top form… Social satire that wears its learning lightly

[A] brilliant novel… A tour de force in language and literary intrigue.

A book pulsing with hilarious and brainy brio… He simultaneously spoofs crime fiction and finds a novel mouthpiece for a mordantly entertaining and exhilaratingly intelligent commentary on the modern world.

A comic tale… It is a masterpiece.

[A] wonderful new novel.

By turns, funny, shocking and compelling. But the writing is so clever and beautiful. I could read it again and again.

The voice of its narrator, a foetus, is splendidly sardonic.

Not only does he pull it off, he does so triumphantly, in the cleverest book I’ve read this year. It’s smart, dark and at times very funny.

A saucy, claustrophobic and darkly funny story which is all rather peculiar. Compulsive reading.

I devoured Ian McEwan’s latest very funny spin on Hamlet.

An ingenious rewrite of Hamlet as a murder story in which a foetus is detective and possible victim.

This is McEwan at his most playfully provocative.

A clever conceit, elegantly wrought, economically constructed.

A bewitching ode to humanity’s beauty, longing and selfishness.

A gripping piece of fiction.

I was hooked from the first page.

[A] smart, eloquent novel.

A enthralling read from one of the world’s master storytellers.

McEwan delights with lyrical prose that is fittingly poetic.

[A] work which both fascinates and disturbs through its unique perspective on a malicious death… Every sentence is a joy to behold, a gift to the reader of delicately considered prose, and thoughtful observations… Alongside its edgy and entertaining narration, and perhaps in part because of it, the novel manages to challenge all preconceptions of the crime genre, upending the whodunit into an extraordinary will-they-do-it… By nature, Nutshell is a novel which perplexes, entertains, and moves the reader in equal turn, all with McEwan’s startling attention to detail, and luxuriant prose style. Read it for its peculiar narrator, read it for the rapidly-changing and intense emotions, or read it just for the thrill of chase as the killing comes to fruition; whatever intrigues you about this novel, just make sure that you do read it – and feel the thrill for yourself.

Brilliantly realised… Any book so bound up in a conceit and in its own verbal fireworks at times runs the risk of being a bit clever-clever. But on the whole we accept in a suspension of disbelief the foetus’s pompous mastery of language and imagery and abandon ourselves to the sheer eloquent pleasure of this hilarious romp.

Short, odd but pleasurable… Great fun, and very well written.

Rich in Shakespearean allusion, this is McEwan on dazzling form.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

Ian McEwan’s brilliance as a stylist and surprise plotter finds a fitting subject in Nutshell…, which is Hamlet as told from inside the womb. Up there with his best.

A gripping tale is told with breathtaking skill, turbocharged with rage against the madness and despair of our modern world.

Nutshell is one of those books you sit down to read and don’t get up until you’ve finished. It is brilliantly executed and full of surprises; original, clever and witty. Simply a must-read

A book I couldn’t put down… brilliantly clever