A work of obvious genius and an extraordinary writer way above most of his contemporaries

Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald

His tale of one man's odyssey through the dark ages of European history is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world. Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st century

W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time

Telling the story via multiple perspectives, the author paints an incredibly textured and compassionate portrait of the characters’ lives. Their love for one another is undeniable, yet their inability to communicate it is devastating. As they collectively and individually struggle with the expectations of their heritage as well as contemporary life, A Place For Us is a timeless, yet also timely, family epic

Absolutely gorgeous... Mirza writes with the wisdom, insight and patience you would expect from a mature novelist adding a final masterpiece to her canon, but this is, fortunately, just the start of an extraordinary career... As Marilynne Robinson has done with Protestants and Alice McDermott has done with Catholics Mirza finds in the intensity of a faithful Muslim family a universal language of love and anguish that speaks to us all... among the most poignant things I have ever read... a privilege

In polished prose that zeroes in on domestic detail and, at its loveliest, recalls Jhumpa Lahiri, Mirza delivers a portrait of a family straining to hold its center amid rebellions both quiet and explosive

Textured and keenly felt... profound... stuck with me long after I finished the book's final page

A modern family saga, it follows the conflict between duty, tradition and temptation... bold in its subject matter and moving

This powerful, intricate debut is essential reading

Told with tender delicacy, A Place for Us is a moving and joyful portrait of a modern family, about growing up between two cultures, reconciling with the past, and identity as a lived experience

Moving, thought-provoking and ultimately positive, this is a story about family, tradition and culture in a modern world

A brilliant, highly readable contemporary tale of identity and belonging

Mirza is a gifted storyteller and this moving novel was one of the highlights of my reading year

This is a richly detailed, immersive saga that hooks you from the jump and keeps you absorbed even as you spend decades with its character

The best book I’ve read this year

In this stunning, generous novel, Mirza looks at the crucial events in an Indian-American Muslim family from many perspectives

Mirza's writing is like poetry as she examines just how far the bonds of family can bend

The great achievement of this novel – as of Vikram Seth’s witty and bounteous classic, A Suitable Boy – is that it traces family troubles that could happen to anybody... touching and unsettling... If this is the standard of Sarah Jessica Parker's list, we can look forward to a feast from Hogarth

Fatima Mirza is brilliant and this novel will break your heart and make it new again

Beautiful, intimate, tender. So vividly told the characters live and breathe

A radiant debut novel about the cultural forces that bind and divide members of one close-knit Muslim-American family

A Place for Us is a triumph and an inspiration. I wish everyone would read this novel. A chronicle of the shattered expectations and irreconcilable desires within an American-Muslim family, A Place for Us hums with a deep faith in an unknown future, reminding its readers that when we are lost, love gives us a map home

‘Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty. It is so deeply imagined, so intimately attentive to and solicitous of the lives it follows, so artful in describing the inseparable human experiences of pride and resentment, humility and loyalty -- and, most of all, love – that it feels not as if we are reading a novel about this Indian Muslim family struggling with tradition and a new culture, but as if we become actual members of the family. It is that immersive, that brilliant, that true’

[I]t’s groundbreaking to read… That we become so invested in a testament to Mirza’s talent

Throughout the course of the novel a complex dynamic of emotion emerges, and the novel unspools with striking maturity

With unwavering compassion, this [is a] beautiful heartbreaker

Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a radiant debut. It accretes its power, beauty, and insight through its tender witnessing of private and family life. With her deeply compassionate view, Mirza dignifies terrain often desecrated by contemporary culture: maternity, faith, the bonds of community, the yearning for goodness, and our duty to others. She shows us the destructiveness of our doubt in those we love, and the mercy of forgiveness. Most wondrously, with this felt and moving novel, Mirza creates a place in which rebellion and reverence seem to embrace

A Place for Us is a radiantly envisioned, beautifully achieved epic about nearly everything that matters: love, family, faith, freedom, betrayal, contrition, absolution. Fatima Farheen Mirza is a magnificent new voice

The title of the book echoes a song from West Side Story, itself a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. Here the warring forces are not two families but one, split by the tension between reverence and rebellion. The author's passion for her subject shines like the moon in the night sky, a recurrent image in this ardent and powerful novel

Extraordinary in its depth... slow-brewing, affecting

A brilliant first novel

A slick debut pulled off with brio, Swan Song is glamorous, vivid and sometimes even daring in its intelligence

A dazzling read

Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades.

With a grounding in history, it is a fascinating read about the deepest secrets of an iconic author.

Intoxicating

Swan Song is utterly divine.It swept me up and I just couldn't put it down ... it is the writing in this debut novel that astounds most of all. It is vivid, addictive and whips up a terrific portrait of a deeply contradictory and complex man, contrasting scenes from his unorthodox childhood with those from the gilded bubble he ended up in that he lanced through his own actions.

A sumptuous look at the icons of Manhattan's high society scene in the mid-20th century ... An immersive readthat will have you questioning real histories versus the ones we create for ourselves.

Ostensibly realistic, it is phantasmagoric… Everything he says bristles with improbable life. Reading it is like watching a movie in which, however much activity there is, the atmosphere dominates the plot

A meditative and dreamily lyrical espionage thriller

Ondaatje brings Warlight’s seemingly disparate fragments together with such skill that the ending feels not just satisfying but inevitable. The most lovely conjuring trick, it leaves you in awe of the magician. I emerged blinking into the glare of the 21st century, bereft in a way a novel hasn’t left me bereft for a longtime

Ondaatje’s onion of a novel, his first since 2011’s The Cat’s Table, combines rich intrigue with a meditation on how we rewrite our memories by examining them… a stunning return.

Magnificent.

Nothing in the world of this novel is ever redundant; nothing is accidental. Whenever you come across a striking detail…you can be sure it will crop up again, be charged with more significance, be joined with the rest of the story in a long chain of meaning.

Mesmerising.

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years is also one of his best – a quiet but profoundly powerful book… A superior, espionage novel about the unstable, shape-shifting nature of personal history.

The evocation of night journeys through the fog-bound city and along mysterious canals and forgotten rivers is spellbinding.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I’d pick it up again in a heartbeat.

Ondaatje’s prose is beautiful, and he successfully builds suspense and tension without seeming too heavy-handed

Michael Ondaatje is at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types

Brilliant dramatic tale

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating. Warlight is a meditation on the purpose and possibilities of storytelling

[T]his elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shift of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… It's a masterful book

[C]ompulsively and grippingly readable… Ondaatje is a marvelous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination

For the lyrical strength of the prose alone, a new Michael Ondaatje novel is always a treat

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war

In Warlight we have a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing – and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven’t read a better novel this year

[Ondaatje’s] prose has a haunting musicality, which George Blagden brings out to the full.

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