A wonderfully engaging novel

Imagine Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude on the empty plains of central Asia...The Railway is a bold and inventive, if damning, whirl through Central Asia's 20th-century history

It is a work of rare beauty - an utterly readable, compelling book

A poet's novel, full of memorable descriptive passages and heart-wrenching asides

All picaresque exuberance, a jumble of influences from Persian to Soviet and beyond

Strange and beautiful

Robert Chandler's tenderly attentive rendering of The Railway perfectly captures the dreamy, circling music of Hamid Ismailov's prose

John Niven is probably the most exciting British writer working today and Straight White Male is addictive, biting, scathing, hilarious and true. I wish I'd never read it so I could read it all again.

The most loveable rogue since John Self in Money. Funny as hell and moving.

Deliciously hyperbolic, obscenely funny, unexpectedly affecting. Niven never, ever, pulls a punch.

The prose is quick, with a distant narrative voice controlling the multiple characters with such assurance that it becomes a character in itself. There are some car-crash scenes that fans of Niven’s work will be familiar with, but he carefully balances farce with emotive drama, and as Marr begins to plummet towards rock bottom, he’s left to deal with consequences that prove no one can have everything ... For pure entertainment it’s a triumph.

It’s an incredible piece of satire, this time about the Hollywood film industry, with a protagonist easily as vile as ‘Kill your Friends’’ Stelfox … Niven created a full-on flesh-and-blood, multilayered, breathing and growing character with depth to his soul that he himself needs to uncover in equally funny and agonising steps, sucked in by his contempt and debauchery, only to find himself struggling to dig his way out of the mire of consequences and heartbreak …. Straight White Male is a novel that has ripped right through me.

A sharp satire.

[A] page-turning satire that’s a masterclass in plate-spinning comic timing.

Straight White Male revisits the familiar Niven world … but this time with a more mature edge – this is a novel about family, growing up, and even love – and a smart assault on academia and the nature of literature … It’s as though Martin Amis decided after Money that being entertaining as well as smart was the way to go … Most fun.

If such a thing as the anti-Hilary Mantel exists in British literature, Niven is probably it. All his stories are madcap cavalcades of disorder, violence, vomit, sex, cocaine, moral turpitude, waste matter and money …Straight White Male is more measured than its predecessors, but only in the sense that Eraserhead is more measured than Cannibal Holocaust … At no point in Straight White Male do you get bored… A kinder, gentler Niven wouldn’t be much use to anybody…Its wordview is dodgy, its execution is brutalist, and it’s much funnier than it has any right to be.

[Kennedy] is a wonderfully appalling anti-hero, in the mould of Martin Amis’s John Self, but also acquires an increasingly prominent and moving backstory as the novel progresses. Fizzing with energy and full of laughs.

belly laughs and some surprising tenderness.

There seems to be a number of books out recently about middle-aged men’s neurosis … but this book is far away and the best I’ve read on this topic. It’s hilarious … This book is funny and brilliant as it attacks the literary and film world. Don’t miss it.

tack-sharp dialogue and [an] enviable turn of phrase…This book will make readers cry with both laughter and sadness. It’s not for the faint of heart, but man, what a yarn.

Niven really does capture the pretensions of lit-scenes outside the London loop extraordinarily well … [There is] a sense of elegy and complication that stays with you long after the final page.

Straight White Male is a horrid little book in lots of ways, a bleary squint into the squalid world of a deeply rancid person. Its worldview is dodgy, its execution is brutalist, and it’s much funnier than it has any right to be.

John Niven’s debut, 2008’s Kill Your Friends, eviscerated the music business, and the hedonistic depths plumbed by its protagonist, the A&R man Steven Stelfox, enough to cause a mortified blush in even the brassiest reader. While maintaining the key essence of that debut – a groove of exhilarating outrageousness that never lets up – Niven’s latest is a more mature work…Niven’s plotting is deft and precise…Straight White Male is caustic and poignant, yet consistently, addictively funny…Clever and joyous, this deserves to do even better than Niven’s bestselling debut.

[S]harply written ... a seriously funny book ... the writing ... is so buzzy and fresh it’s still wet on the page.

A hugely entertaining and surprisingly moving book.

The novel is as much comic as tragic…Hilarious…The gimlet-eyed descriptions of celebrity life are impossible to read without smirking…[Niven] can provoke tears of sorrow as well as laughter. . . The complexity and inexplicability of love is a serious subject but, thanks to Niven’s talent, the manopause (sic) has never been such fun.

An incredible book about hedonism

I loved that book.

[O]ne of my favourite reads of the year … Funny, irreverent, touching and well-written, this is definitely recommended.