Compelling...An engaging book that will surely see you pondering the challenges and patterns in your own life

A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story, set against the bleak beauty and baroque decay of 21st century Delhi - its rubble, construction sites, wastelands, and the poisoned ooze of its dead river. What Twilight in Delhi is to the twentieth-century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the twenty-first: the essence of India’s corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent.

Twenty-first-century Delhi needed a voice, and here it is, in all its dark majesty. A Bad Character comes as if from nowhere: it is an alchemical marvel, a novel of stunning beauty and originality.

A Bad Character…captures [Delhi] in such perfect detail that I felt I could smell the food stalls, feel the crush of people and the heat rising from the pavements... As well as her transcendent eye for detail, the love story at the heart of this book is honest and deeply unsettling, making it a compelling read.

A fiery, incandescent debut, A Bad Character artfully captures the fragmented psyche and perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi... [Kapoor's] writing has the flexible, lyrical cadence of a prose poem... A Bad Character is a powerful, psychologically acute, elegantly crafted debut that promises great things to come from Kapoor.

The characters are interesting and the story grips, but the heart of this book is Delhi: filthy, challenging, destructive and thrillingly alive. A powerful read.

A poignant and impressionistic portrait of the end of adolescence and a changing world.

Annihilating desire laps at the edges of Deepti Kapoor's A Bad Character...offers vivid insights into what it means to be a middle-class woman in 21st-century Delhi.

Dark, sexy, magnetic, this is a grown-up coming of age story.

Beautifully describes every scent, sight and sound of Delhi… A love letter to India, while fully acknowledging its flaws... the country’s dangers and restrictions, especially for women.

A Bad Character is thrilling and intense and dark.

An intense treatise on the nature of desire and probably the best portrait of new India since Slumdog Millionaire.

The story and style are reminiscent of Marguerite Duras's The Lover, but when fused with teh vivid Delhi scenes, Kapoor's novel ventures into exciting and original territory.

The literary fiction debut of the year… the coming of age story of a 21-year-old girl from Delhi, laced with poetry, confusion, sex and drugs. A fan of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover? Get this book.

A dream-like debut that explores the dark side of Delhi...the story is quick to move, charged with the energy of a racy page-turner, and visceral in its treatment of female desire and sexuality.

Kapoor paints a vast and detailed landscape of Delhi, canvassing the city and its people, its smells and stories, its ability to harbour hope and heartbreak in the same breath. With remarkable candour, she crafts sentences that stand out for their elegance and brevity; they linger in your memory long after the last page has been turned.

The sparely elegant phrases pack a wealth of colour, smell and association, evoking the reality of a city straining at the leashes, pulsating with deviant, joyous life.

Fractured, fragmented and beautiful.

[Kapoor] writes with a keening, furious sorrow that rang in my ears well after I finished the book.

One of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully

A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a jeu d'esprit about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist.

A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels

Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappoint

Brilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh