Bone-crunching action adventure

Breathtaking action...as real as it gets

Serious Sweet is a magnificent novel, showing Kennedy at the very top of her game. Ambitious in scope, daring in execution, full of dazzling apercus and dark comedy… It is a tale of redemption, as serious and as sweet as you could wish for.

In equal measures, funny, sad and addictive… The opening pages had me holding my breath in fear and anticipation… Capturing the relentless hustle of London life to perfection.

A. L. Kennedy shakes her city until the right atoms collide. She stands back to give a picture of the whole of London on one day, and then suddenly swoops down to pick up a tiny detail.

Deeply affecting... Kennedy strips her characters emotionally bare… Serious Sweet portrays intense lives of quiet desperation: it is a novel about hope and muted courage and, at the end of the day, a very tentatively experienced optimism.

A. L. Kennedy's eighth novel is a profoundly moving, often funny, and at points rending depiction of two good people. Serious Sweet is about the heroism of decency; albeit damaged decency... Kennedy is not one of our finest writers simply because of the quality of her prose: she is because of the moral profundity of her work.

This is a bold, cinematic novel... Parts of it are terrifically funny.

A genuinely stirring love story.

Her flair for describing feelings and relationships makes this an engaging window into the messy minds of Londoners and her commentary on the city rings true.

Determinedly and impressively intellectual… A novel of ideas that is deft enough never to be didactic because it asks more question than it answers.

This is an author with a proven ability to see – truly see – and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page.

[Like] Sleepless in Seattle, respun by James Joyce, and set within a London on the precipice of Brexit.

Her best book in years.

Uniquely moving love story.

Kennedy is never less than illuminating.

[Kennedy is] witty, sharp, almost too intelligent and a bit provocative.

An uplifting tale of the triumph of niceness over nastiness.

A writer of exquisite precision… A public novel, angrily political… Expressing her idea of a writer’s social responsibility so eloquently… Well-suited to Kennedy’s talent and her characteristically oblique and original way of seeing the world.

What sets this novel apart is Kennedy’s physical and emotional sensitivity to both solitude and tenderness.

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.

Sweetly funny, The Idiot rejects the doctrine of omitting needless words in favour of marvelling…at the complexities of language and communication.

Charming… A gentle coming-of-age novel drawing on Batuman’s time at Harvard in the mid-1990s… It’s in such acute portrayals of early adulthood’s uncertainties that this pleasantly rambling tale leaves its most vivid impression.

A delightfully digressive campus novel.

There is more than one idiot in this delightful and slyly funny coming-of-age novel... Will strike a chord for any former fresher who felt the same way. (That would be all of us.)

Batuman, in seemingly writing a novel about nothing, has produced an incredibly complex, accurate and funny novel.

I never want to finish it, so I’m reading it very slowly.

Every page is thicketed with jokes, riffs, theories of language. It’s a portrait of an intellectual and sentimental education that offers almost unseemly pleasure.

Elif Batuman is a real writer, and should be allowed to write whatever the hell she likes.

Selin’s deadpan narration is often very funny indeed

This is a capacious book that creates an alternative world

At once clever and clueless, Batuman’s heroine shows us with just how messy it can be to forge a self

One of the best novels I read all summer... a painstakingly accurate depiction of the balancing act that is student-life. As clever as it is funny, Batuman's debut novel allows us to laugh at our own stupidity, and celebrate our own cluelessness.

The Idiot... manages the trick of being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually being a comedy. It just observers life, in all its truth and is hilarious for page after page.

I finally read The Idiot by Elif Batuman and everyone is correct, she is clearly a genius