Seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude

Clifton was one of America's great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task is regenerative

Few poets have traversed such deserts, playgrounds and high castles of possibility in the briefest and seemingly effortless poetry. Her big-hearted work welcomes us and transports us with grace and mischief. It is poetry that goes down like fine wine and that sustains, in us, its good mood of inquiry ever after

Open up to any page and Clifton delivers a word. Whether the subject is roaches, family, death, or surviving, she has a psalm for all occasions. She can create the most complicated magic out of the simplest words

Clifton's earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago. Each poem is always its own world. Her poems touch on the political, the personal, the spiritual

Clifton wrote physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds ... Her poems are committed to truth-telling in the face of silence. History in her work is embodied, alive, and autonomous, alert to its own contradictions

No-one writes like Lucille Clifton ... The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder - bearing witness to joy and to struggle

Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak

A triumph. A novel in verse, an elegy, a profound act of witness . . . Eliza is brought to such tangible and complex life I feel as though I've met her

'One of my favourite books of all time. Every collection by Liz Berry is a treasure, but this one struck even deeper. It has universal reach to the ongoing exploitation of earth's poor.

A haunting, deeply compelling narrative, that holds the reader tight to the animal anchor of the natural world, and speaks in the unique idiolect of its own genealogy

The Home Child is so beautiful . . . [Liz] honours Home Children & with a eerie magic ventriloquises her ancestor Eliza Showell

'A remarkable collection . . . A thought-provoking weave of fact and imagination . . . It describes in her own words how her life is transformed, and in doing so, transforms ours'

Deeply moving. A graceful, delicate book, stunning in its emotional depth... I know I'll return to it many times in the future

There is something of Hardy's heartbreak note to these poems . . . The Home Child is both blues and rhapsody; Liz Berry's musicality and gift for the telling image matched by her sensitivity to and love for her subject.

Deeply moving, unforgettable.

'Liz Berry's poetry is spell-work . . . Her voice carves creatures out of words, and sets them dancing.'

Liz Berry ... sings of love, loss, grief, work, wonder, hope. To say I love this, the quiet power of it, would understate

'Liz Berry's poems are captivating and charged with her characteristically rich and sensuous Black Country language. The Home Child brings to light the devastating history of forced child migration in the service of Empire and is a deeply moving tribute to the author's great aunt. This is a book that should be on the curriculum'

Liz Berry achieves a fusion of poetry and fiction as gripping as any thriller... Inspired by the true story of her great aunt...this compelling novel in verse is a moving portrait of a girl who will never see her family again

A tour de force... Beautifully crafted and quietly devastating, The Home Child is a masterpiece

Deeply poignant, the words through The Home Child seem cut into each page and defy you to read them at speed

A wonderfully realised novel in verse

Free Love artfully delves beneath the veneer of the British middle class to tell an intimate story of generational discord, political change and sexual freedom.

Hadley's resplendent eighth novel... [has] poignantly astute observations on class, destiny and the false promises of the sexual revolution.

Hadley's eighth novel is as absorbing as any of her other fiction, with complex family secrets, brilliant insights...and lush descriptions of nature.

Hadley chooses her words with spellbinding precision.

Hadley's complex sentences are purring marvels of engineering... A brilliant writer of interiority...she has a gift...for portraying the state of wanting to be wanted, or simply to be seen... almost every page struck me anew with some elegant phrasing, feline irony or shrewdly sympathetic insight.

Few contemporary novelists write about their characters' inner worlds with a finely filigreed but plain-spoken acuity that Tessa Hadley brings to her work...accessing roving, rich depths... Hadley is a master in her field.

"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she's one of the greatest stylists alive. . . . To read Hadley's fiction is to grow self-conscious in the best way: to recognize with astonishment the emotions playing behind our own expressions, to hear articulated our own inchoate anxieties. . . . The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent-lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley's attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire. . . . Extraordinary.

Brilliant.... In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day would feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.... It's to her credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once.... We've seen this before, and we've never seen this before, and it's spectacular.

Utterly engrossing... Free Love is highly gratifying.

Free Love is a triumph.

Brilliantly done... Hadley writes with devastating psychological insight, her prose spare and scalpel sharp. But she is also judiciously non-judgemental, a generous chronicler of the foibles and fears that mar and make a marriage.

Free Love is an absolute joy to read from a writer who never puts a word wrong. Fans of Small Pleasures will love it.

[A] brilliant, sensual, seductively plotted new novel... Hadley has written an extraordinary story about love and transformation.

Free Love is often deeply perceptive and affecting... it lets you imagine what it was like to wrestle with old and new ways of thinking in an age that shaped (and continues to shape) our own.

It's the 1960s and socialism, sex and nuclear anxiety have come crashing into the middle-class bubble Tessa Hadley novels usually operate so brilliant within.

A story about change and its limits, its beautifully judged ending will bring you to tears.

[An] acutely realised, deeply humane novel... Unmissable.

No novel published this year gave me more pleasure than Tessa Hadley's Free Love.

Nothing drew me in as conclusively as Free Love by Tessa Hadley, who is surely one of our most astute and deft observers of everyday lives.

Hadley's novels continue to get better and better - and this is her finest, most pleasurable yet... it's near enough the perfect present in book form

She is, in all her mastery of the craft, a writer's writer.