C inserts itself, slyly yet confidently, into the history of modernism. This is a genuinely exciting and spookily beautiful book, a new kind of joy

McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories

Skilfully realised, ambitious

An intelligent, ambitious book... A beautiful, accessible novel with a thrilling tale. This is one of the most brilliant books to have hit the shelves this year and McCarthy deserves high praise for an electric piece of writing which should be enjoyed as well as discussed

C is formidably well assembled, and it is admirable for an unashamed literary ambition

Chilling and brilliant

A narrative of energy, invention and intelligence begins to take shape: one that is at once dazzling and profoundly resonant...Tom McCarthy has written a novel for our times: refreshingly different, intellectually acute and strikingly enjoyable. Whether the Man Booker judges concur remains to be seen, but is seems highly unlikely that anyone will publish a better novel this year

The strength of the novel is in the richness of McCarthy's intelligent, detailed research, while Serge is the cipher that he's used to convey it

McCarthy has fashioned a poised, polished and occasionally perplexing novel that frames the dawn of the communications onslaught now engulfing us...Builds into a breathless tour de force...combining the impetus, mystery and gale-force pandemonium of the age- not to mention McCarthy's delirious prose - into a swirling finale that is at once confounding and eminently satisfying

McCarthy is a richly gifted novelist

...C is a very good book indeed... McCarthy is one of the most intelligent and talented novelists of our generation.

Its questioning hypnotic textures pay dividends

Whatever happens to this novel or to this writer, a chain of events has been set in motion. Nothing and no one is going to stop it going on and on.

Tom McCarthy's C... a novel blazing with energy and, for all its postmodern ambitions, a rich, old-fashioned yarn

I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy's C also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize.

McCarthy's high-voltage writing runs through the reader like a charge.

New readers could grasp just how boldly he has tried to balance sumptuous period-fiction prose with a mischievous desire to sabotage his chosen form.

An exciting, revealing and touching story

The novel's interest (or lack thereof) lies mainly in its stubborn refusal of anything resembling a narrative payoff...I loved it, right down to the prose, which, unspooling in a vaguely menacing present-continuous, sounds like screenplay instructions to a set designer

A dazzlingly agile novel about the interconnectedness of things

Entertaining as well as ambitious

McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity