Sean Borodale is without doubt the most exciting new poet I have read since Alice Oswald. His Bee Journal raises the bar for us all and announces a thrilling new voice in British poetry

Truly heady and intense poems, honey itself in poetic form, a sustained tour de force of language and thought

This book is a kind of uncut home-movie of bees. I like its oddness and hurriedness, its way of catching the world exactly as it happens in the split-second before it sets into poetry. These are pre-poems, note-poems dictated by phenomena. Their context is bees, but their subject (intriguingly) is Time...

Harbours great energy and abundant imagination...a strikingly original voice

Borodale is an extremely accomplished poet…the most beautiful expression of what it is like to live with bees that you could hope to find…they show a wonderful clarity of thought and expression and a great talent for capturing an impression. The recent rising popularity of beekeeping has spawned a number of popular books on the subject but this towers above them all in ambition and emotional effect. It is an exquisite window into bees and beekeeping

Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal lifts the veil on the apiarists life and goes to the heart of the hive… The dense and intense language is the verbal equivalent of the honey that delights the tongue

Book to savour and reserve for treat reading, a bit like the best honey…a word-filled jar of golden treasure

This beekeeping journal in verse form provides an intimate portrait.

The past few summers in the states as well as here in the UK I’ve become aware the music of buzzing insects such as bees has dimmed and it concerns me. Borodale’s poems are like honey on toast, a reminder of what I want my grandchildren to taste in the future as sweetly as I have in the past.

The Unknown Terrorist is accessible and timely as they come - an intense and thoughtful thriller set in paranoid Sydney ablaze with terrorism fever

Flanagan's theme and style is epic and sweeping... I relished descriptions of a society where cruelty and fear lurk beneath a paper-thin moral veneer

A mighty book

A fast-paced, sexually charged whodunit that suggests a far more complex reality... Flanagan's writing is a brilliant reflection of a world full of steamy sex, drugs and violence, with a touch of high-status voyeurism... The Unknown Terrorist mocks the thriller genre even as it fulfils its expectations

Well observed... Never less than a ballsy, enjoyable read... Like Showgirls written by Don DeLillo instead of Joe Eszterhas

A little corker

Brimming with colourful characters, written with tremendous verve and bursting with information... it exuberantly resurrects an age of transition and enthrallingly depicts the pleasures and pressures of creativity.

A vast, sprawling epic, packed with digression and detail, it is a brilliant achievement for a first-time novelist.

The work of a genius

Engrossing detail… Exuberantly broadens out from indictment to celebration… Teems with vividly idiosyncratic characters…. Burstingly informative and thronged with colorful characters, this panoramic novel about the shady start and sunny breakthrough of a literary phenomenon is a phenomenon itself.

Exquisite . . . Martin Stewart's descriptions of Wull's world gripped in winter are brutal and beautiful, his monsters are terrifyingly plausible

Absorbing… Serious without being solemn, sweet without being sickly, it’s an elegant tale about the unexpected places where kindness and sympathy can flourish and deepen.

Kennedy’s comedy is ruthlessly observed – an anti-romance that warms into something moving and profound. It’s also a brilliant portrait of city living.

Two lonely people go about their day in London in this typically Kennedian and utterly wonderful novel… but they find their way towards each other in an agonising love story that’s all about morality and decency in a careless world… Kennedy is a stand-up comedian, and observational comedy runs through this novel in interior monologues that are heartbreakingly familiar and laugh-out-loud sad. Her sentences are some of the best in modern fiction (there’s a springer spaniel called Hector with “black, bewildered ears… [that] made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.”) and reading her prose is like eating those fizzy sweets that are both sweet and sour make you wince at the back of your mouth – then go back for more… It’s gorgeous.

Consistently raw and powerful… emotionally exhausting… But there’s a lot to be said for a novel which sets so much store by “affection and tenderness”, and in which the emotional peaks and the possibilities of redemption and renewal are marked by the simple holding of hands.

I love, love, love the Rushdie – I think it’s my favourite of his… The fantasy elements are just magical and, of course, it’s gorgeously written.

An apocalyptic battle between reason and unreason, good and evil, light and darkness, with all the bells and whistles of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Not only a beautifully written satire-as-fairytale but the subject matter is bang on trend… That Rushdie should still be writing so potently and still be continuing to push back the frontiers, when he could easily pull up a deck chair and languish on the frontiers he already owns is wonderful, inspirational and profoundly (but only in the best way) terrifying… 10/10, Master.

Ambitious, smart and dark fable that is full of rich and profound notions about human nature.

I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness, humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.