An exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive...fuelled by a sense of thrilling, righteous rage.

Magnificent. A radical interrogation of incarceration, racism, entertainment, the whole fabric of American injustice, as well as a pure fire page turner.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is one of the most exciting young writers in America. His work is urgent, engaging, wildly entertaining, formally bold and politically electrifying. Read one page, any page, and you'll see what I mean.

A rumbustious satire of the criminal justice system, a book that is far more entertaining than an attempt to convince its readers of the case for prison abolition has any right to be.

Adjei-Brenyah is clearly a writer of substance, with something to say.

Adjei-Brenyeh's sentences are nimble, his chapters brisk yet full of brio. He knows what he's doing, and it's this innate authority that makes Chain-Gang All-Stars so compelling - right up to the final, fatal blow

Adjei-Brenyah's piercing satirical takedown on the current state of the US penal system is grimly funny, epically violent and - at times - surprisingly tender. Quite the ride.

We simply couldn't put it down... enthralling and engaging

Brutal, thrilling, devastating and beautiful

Compelling... The range of different narrators provides a smart 360-degree perspective of the too-familiar society that demands murder for entertainment

The new maestro of dystopian lit has arrived.

While physical imprisonment - its degradations, its inefficacy - is central to this fantastically confident, nimble, entertaining and impassioned novel, Adjei-Brenyah is alert to more metaphorical and conceptual manifestations of incarceration, too. He ultimately asks us to reassess our tired, harmful thinking about what prison is really for. He demands that we imagine something better.

A hugely imaginative read - the world-building is masterful - while also making a powerful point about incarceration in America today...Unmissable.

An incredible feat - Adjei-Brenyah has created a completely built world that is rooted in reality, but also allows the imagination to expand on the silences and fallacies of a country hell-bent on glamorising the cruel practice of incarceration.

A defiant, awe-inspiring novel that will be read, studied and celebrated for generations, Chain-Gang All-Stars leads with love. Readers will be forever changed by this book.

Terrific. A blistering exploration of a near future world that feels by turns bonkers and achingly prescient.

Like Orwell's 1984 and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Adjei-Brenyah's book presents a dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we're capable of doing... So raw and tragic and primal is Chain-Gang All-Stars that despite its futuristic elements, it has the patina of some timeworn epic...Shockingly intimate and moving.

You cannot applaud Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's debut novel without getting blood on your hands... [Adjei-Brenyah] fills the characters' inner lives to the brim... The society in which they live defines them by their worst deeds, but the writer of this novel refuses to.

Deservedly acclaimed, Adjei-Brenyah is as commanding a storyteller as he is a world-builder.

Vividly imaginative and startling in its clarity of intent...A sort of The Hunger Games meets Gladiator meets WWE meets the modern private prison system.

Adjei-Brenyah may have the buzziest book of the year . . . A ferocious attack on America's for-profit prison systems.

Beautiful and brutal, with a really furious social commentary underpinning it.

Chain-Gang All-Stars surpasses all expectations...Adjei-Brenyah's acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth.

Chain-Gang All-Stars should pique your interest if titles like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale are more your vibe.

Makes explicit how the spirit erodes as the body becomes currency. Adjei-Brenyah writes sharply about the economy of spectacle and the fickle alchemy between futility and hope.

Told with bold, muscular prose, this book is filled with surprising tenderness. As big as it is dazzling. It's just wild how good and original this book is. A revelation!

This book will change you!...A masterpiece.

Adjei-Brenyah is...[an] acclaimed master of our futuristic nightmares...a keen observer of racial and socioeconomic disparities that result in a high number of Black people incarcerated. While this is set in the future, it feels uncomfortably close to the present.

A brutal, heart-wrenching story that feels so close to reality...A tale of survival and resistance in an unfair prison system.

[A] blazing debut novel...A damning indictment of mass incarceration, systemic racism, and the grotesqueries of unfettered American capitalism, Chain-Gang All-Stars is also a breathless dystopian thriller.

In a narrative world where the real is growingly more unbelievable than the make believe, Chain-Gang All-Stars is an uncanny, singular feat for literature. I've never read satire so bruising, so brolic, so tender and, really, so pitch-perfect. It's nuts brilliant. Just read it!

As vital as it is brutal. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah illuminates darkness with the electricity of his prose. The massive weight of the subject is matched by the sheer scope of Adjei-Brenyah's imagination. A startling, important novel that will inspire and inform many conversations.

[A] ferocious debut novel...Adjei-Brenyah does not flinch. Neither does he miss his targets, because he has the stiff winds of history at his back...With Chain-Gang All-Stars he lets us think we're reading a satire, but soon reveals a mirror of our dystopian days that lie not too far away.

A complex, brutal, beautiful, panoramic takedown of the prison-industrial complex... At once original, its own fresh creation, and clearly part of a lineage of American literature that links the opening 'Battle Royal' chapter in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Native Son by Richard Wright, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Soledad Brother by George Jackson... Adjei-Brenyah's distinguished novel updates this tradition to encompass our dizzying, barbaric, performative and capitalistic digital age.

With his sharp eye for satire and reverence for humanity, Adjei-Brenyah's latest explores the exploitation, violence, and false promises of the prison industrial complex, capitalism, and the country itself.

A chillingly dystopian tale.

A clear-eyed critique of our country's prison system, along with the profit and racism inherent in them.

At once a kaleidoscopic, imaginative examination of America's unjust prison system, and a fantasy-tinged spectacle, Chain-Gang All-Stars is likely to excite and provoke in equal measure.

A searing debut with an unforgettable voice, Chain Gang All-Stars will force you to reevaluate what freedom in America really means.

It is an up-to-the-minute j'accuse that speaks to the eternal question of what it truly means to be free. And human. Imagine The Hunger Games refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.

Breathtaking and pulse-pounding... Both the political allegory and the edge-of-your-seat action work beautifully. Readers will be wowed.

[An] enthralling debut... An unmissable read

Adjei-Brenyah compels the reader to look beyond the page, blurring the lines between modern America and the hellscape he so energetically imagines

Few others this year have touched Adjei-Brenyah for ideas and ambition… perhaps the most indelible novel of 2023

Lessons is a terrifically enjoyable account of how personal and political history intersect through the life of Roland Baines.

McEwan's writing is as elegant and ideas-packed as ever.

A tale of dislocation and dissatisfaction, but also of warmth and humour.

As a novel which tells the story of post-war Britain, Lessons is without parallel... a wonderfully soulful and meditative book.

I loved Ian McEwan's blissfully long cradle-to-grave novel Lessons... It is life-affirming, deep and A-grade storytelling.

McEwan's longest and most autobiographical novel is also his most richly enjoyable for many years... the messiness of life reverberate with hard-won emotional truth.

A humane and highly thought-provoking novel

A riveting chronicle of our times

McEwan delights with lyrical prose that is fittingly poetic.

[A] work which both fascinates and disturbs through its unique perspective on a malicious death… Every sentence is a joy to behold, a gift to the reader of delicately considered prose, and thoughtful observations… Alongside its edgy and entertaining narration, and perhaps in part because of it, the novel manages to challenge all preconceptions of the crime genre, upending the whodunit into an extraordinary will-they-do-it… By nature, Nutshell is a novel which perplexes, entertains, and moves the reader in equal turn, all with McEwan’s startling attention to detail, and luxuriant prose style. Read it for its peculiar narrator, read it for the rapidly-changing and intense emotions, or read it just for the thrill of chase as the killing comes to fruition; whatever intrigues you about this novel, just make sure that you do read it – and feel the thrill for yourself.

Brilliantly realised… Any book so bound up in a conceit and in its own verbal fireworks at times runs the risk of being a bit clever-clever. But on the whole we accept in a suspension of disbelief the foetus’s pompous mastery of language and imagery and abandon ourselves to the sheer eloquent pleasure of this hilarious romp.

Short, odd but pleasurable… Great fun, and very well written.

Rich in Shakespearean allusion, this is McEwan on dazzling form.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

Ian McEwan’s brilliance as a stylist and surprise plotter finds a fitting subject in Nutshell…, which is Hamlet as told from inside the womb. Up there with his best.

A gripping tale is told with breathtaking skill, turbocharged with rage against the madness and despair of our modern world.

Nutshell is one of those books you sit down to read and don’t get up until you’ve finished. It is brilliantly executed and full of surprises; original, clever and witty. Simply a must-read

A book I couldn’t put down… brilliantly clever