BLACKSTRAP HAWCO is a story of Newfoundland from its beginnings to its present, and stretching forward to its future. The intensely physical lives of Blackstrap Hawco and his people are as vivid as the blood they spill. The book is gripping and painful but redeemed by love. Kenneth J. Harvey demonstrates the pulse of what it means to be alive.

Nick Harkaway’s most ambitious novel yet. This story of near-future mass surveillance, artificial intelligence and human identity reads as if 11 novels have been crowded into a matter-transporter pod, emerging on the other side weirdly melded. An enormous, shaggy, infuriating, amazing and quite unforgettable piece of fiction, it’s the kind of thing only science fiction can do.

One of the most remarkable things about the remarkable Nick Harkaway is the irrelevance of his literary heritage. The son of John le Carré, he is very much his own author ... There’s a lot of explanation in this book, but then there’s a lot of everything going on in it. Densely texted pages of ideas, references and similes fizz and sparkle and burst into life in a fireworks display that keeps going ... The writing, too, is rarely anything other than impressive ... Gnomon does reward perseverance. Ludicrously complicated it may be, but it’s also wonderfully good.

[A] prowling deep-sea monster of a novel … A sci-fi detective procedural, violent thriller and multi-layered mystery combine brilliantly to pull us through a profound exploration of power and paranoia, technology and myth … Harkaway dazzles, baffles and teases before guiding us through bloody darkness into understanding.

This huge sci-fi detective novel of ideas is so eccentric, so audaciously plotted and so completely labyrinthine and bizarre that I had to put it aside more than once to emit Keanu-like “Whoahs” of appreciation ... It’s a technological shaggy-dog tale that threatens to out-Gibson William Gibson ... It is huge fun. And it will melt your brain … 700 odd pages power relentlessly by, only to touch down with the delicacy of a SpaceX rocket on – ah yes – the only possible ending. Whoah indeed. I wanted to give it a round of applause.

Gnomon is only as large as its pages, but its pages seem like the door to a sinister Narnia … Reading Gnomon is like being an architecture critic when you suspect your reality is virtual. Its momentum is exhilarating, but frightening too. It resembles, very stylishly, a mind spinning itself insane.

A brainy, labyrinthine plot born of Dr Who and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, with a dash of EU finance, Brexit and some Snowden-esque paranoia about the pervasive surveillance of ‘the System’. A mind-bending, genre-blending fun house with a message or two.

Trying to situate Gnomon in today’s literary landscape indicates how odd a figure it cuts. It has something of the large, fine-grained restlessness of David Foster Wallace, the scale and ambition of Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. But it’s considerably more gonzo than any of them. It oughtn’t to work. It does, though. Gnomon is that rare thing, a book that cannot be accurately summarised or described. It needs to be experienced. And the experience, though it sometimes threatens to overwhelm, is always readable, absorbing, thought-provoking and, in the final analysis, unlike anything else. This novel is its own thing, separated from the continent, not part of the main. Gnomon is an island. And an island you really should visit.

There is a glorious maximalism to the work of Nick Harkaway … Each novel has questioned – with admirable exuberance – one of the pillars of the novel itself … If one can level a criticism at the work of Jorge Luis Borges it would be that it is so perfectly distilled: Harkaway, on the other hand, takes the same themes and produces endless cadenzas around them. There is a brilliance to his writing, in which each idea is stretched and inverted, contorted and deformed. And he has a gift for the ingenious quip, the aphorism, the sensory simile … Gnomon is a kind of metaphysical epic … The surface sparkle belies a deep seriousness … Gnomon is a serious investigation of technological possibility.

Opening a novel by Nick Harkaway feels like stepping into a theme park for the mind – every page you turn brings new delights for the mind and the senses. Gnomon is brilliant and terrifying, full of pleasures big and small. Basically, everything I want in a book.

This is a book that is in love with books, and no reader can help but warm to that.

A bit like Terry Pratchett meets Franz Kafka … Harkaway seems like he must have a brain the size of a planet.

Woven with witty allusions to everything from obscure texts to pop songs, and warning against an unthinking sacrifice of privacy to paranoia, Gnomon will appeal to fans of William Gibson and David Mitchell.

A novel of energy and huge ambition … that confirms the emergence of major talent.

A psychedelic experience.

Stylishly mad

A book to get lost in.

The great chronicler of Englishness

A copper bottomed masterpiece

Coe's comic critique of a divided country dazzles . . . properly laugh-out-loud funny . . . it is also incisive and brilliant about our divided country and the deep chasms revealed by the vote to leave. Do not miss

The first great Brexit novel

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

Jonathan Coe's Middle England is brilliantly insightful on the times we are living in

Let me add to the chorus of praise for Jonathan Coe's new book Middle England. Easily my favourite of his since What a Carve Up! Which did for Thatcherism what Middle England does for Brexit

An astute, enlightened and enlightening journey into the heart of our current national identity crisis. Both moving and funny. As we'd expect from Coe

From post-industrial Birmingham to the London riots and the current political gridlock, it takes in family, literature and love in a comedy for our times

Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

Probably the best English novelist of his generation

No modern novelist is better at charting the precariousness of middle-class life

An angry and exuberant book

Jonathan Coe has established himself as one of the most entertaining chroniclers of our times

You can't stop reading....I was haunted for days