The strength of the book lies in its energy, its mixture of humour and heartwrenching emotion, its twisting narrative, its playful use of cricketing facts and characters, and its occasional blazing anger about what Sri Lanka has done to itself...

Carries real weight...a mixture of, say, CLR James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack...essential to anyone with a taste for maverick genius

Karunatilaka has a real lightness of touch. He mixes humour and violence with the same deftness with which his protagonist mixes drinks

Chinaman is a debut bristling with energy and confidence, a quixotic novel that is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean to madcap dreams

Chinaman's free-wheeling, zany tempo is part of its charm too. Its picaresque action, mainly based in Colombo and narrated in short bite-sized chunks, gives a vibrant comic pulse to Sri Lankan life, even though Karunatilaka's portrait of the country is scathing...it confirms that cricket, a game that is largely played in the head and inhabits a bizarrely detailed parallel world to our own, is ideally suited to the purposes of fiction

A Great Cricket Novel. For a game without much great fiction, that's a reason to applaud with drums - and forget the rules the marshals impose at Lord's

It's funny and original, extremely revealing about Sri Lanka, and as for the cricket, in the author's own words: "If you can't understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you." Brilliant

At an early stage, I will confess that I was very close to typing 'Pradeep Mathew Cricinfo' into Google just to check whether there was indeed a Sri Lankan cricketer of that name ... that may be a recommendation of the book; it may be a condemnation. But I have always had a soft spot for Sri Lankan cricket

A hugely entertaining read

Confident and poignant debut

A devastatingly limber, comic, cricket-themed piece of social satire. It is simply a great novel. It is also a deliciously moreish treat, a flushing out of all those furtively tended obsessions with the game's history, culture, statistics and privately cherished player-crushes

Pradeep is a character who really should have been real, his tale capturing the chaotic essence of Sri Lankan cricket brilliantly - the good, the bad and the ugly

This is a resonant story, in which you suddenly find that you have absorbed on the nod more about the Sri Lankan character than you might have thought possible or likely... I can hardly believe this is a first novel... He has with no apparent effort got into the mind of an articulate, wise but despairing and cynical drunken old hack, and this long, languorous and winding novel has registers of tragedy, farce, lauhg-out-loud humour and great grace. Karunatilaka is, I gather, writing another novel, but how it can be as good as this I can hardly imagine

In this idiosyncratic, often hilarious debut novel, a dying Sri Lankan sportswriter decides to pursue his quixotic dream of making a documentary about a long-forgotten cricketing genius

Chinaman – to resort to the most groan inducing of cricketing clichés – bowled me over. Like all the best sporting novels, it places its subject in a wider context. All in all, Karunatilaka’s big, bold debut is a more or less unmitigated triumph. It made me laugh; it made me cry; it even made me reconsider my long-held antipathy towards the game of crickets. And I can think of no higher recommendation than that

As far as literary fiction goes, this is both incredibly literary and amazingly enjoyable… Lyrical, poetic, and always written with the same bittersweet quality which captured my attention right at the start, this is an absolute gem of a book… Clearly, this is about the highest possible recommendation, whether or not you like cricket… When I got to the end, the only issue I had with the book was that I wished it hadn’t finished

There is much to enjoy in Sri Lankan Karunatilaka’s energetic debut novel… The book bristles with grouchy humour, laconic observations on Sri Lanka’s political troubles and the pathos of coming to the end of life. Steering just the right side of sentiment, it is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean to madcap dreams

A rollercoaster of a novel

A deliberately rambling account of a dying sportswriter’s attempts to get to the truth of the disappearance of a Sri Lankan bowler... It’s brilliant

Highly accomplished

Nutshell was…a pleasure to read… [It’s] very funny.

McEwan, whose prose is always exquisite, is best known for Amsterdam, Atonement and Saturday. His Nutshell is a stunt, but a gorgeous one, studded with Joycean reflections on fathers, the wisdom of pop songs and reviews of placenta-filtered fine wine.

Perhaps you’ve got to read it to believe it? That’s certainly what I urge. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Nutshell features the novelist at his best, combining the unsettling morbidity of his early works with the wit and depth of his later publications… It is comforting to know too that McEwan, one of the great writers of his generation, part of the defining clique of his time, continues to carve his talents into jewels 40 years on.

[McEwan] spins this gripping yarn in his usual sublime prose, sprinkled with the blackest of comic relief… The only criticism one could level at this slender beauty is that it’s over all too soon.

This, McEwan’s fourteenth novel, proves once again that he is a writer finely attuned to how the heart beats. He knows how to make his reader feel entertained, happy, and sad, all within twenty pages – an expert in the craft of the sad smile, so to speak… Be assured – you don’t have to be a fan of the play to read this novel; it is a pleasure in its own right.

It has a great concept and a brilliant opening… I love the way the wisecracking narrator…picks up information about the world… It shows what can be done with the form, that there are still new ways to experiment.

Possibly the most unusual crime book of the year. A witty and suspenseful story told from inside a mother's womb.

It's an intriguing set-up, and one that allows McEwan to do what he's good at. The crime is deftly charted, expertly paced. Much of the writing is lean and queasily vivid.

McEwan is even more brilliant when turning his pen to wry humour and satire… An intelligent social satire.

A classic tale of murder and deceit.

[It’s] incredibly brave and only one of our greatest authors could pull it off. He does, with aplomb. The sheer command of language and confidence with prose is a tutorial for us lesser authors.

This dark, clever tale is among the best of McEwan’s newer novels.

[Nutshell is] hilarious and compelling… [A] ripping, gripping yarn – narrative velcro.

McEwan is on top form… Social satire that wears its learning lightly

[A] brilliant novel… A tour de force in language and literary intrigue.

A book pulsing with hilarious and brainy brio… He simultaneously spoofs crime fiction and finds a novel mouthpiece for a mordantly entertaining and exhilaratingly intelligent commentary on the modern world.

A comic tale… It is a masterpiece.

[A] wonderful new novel.

By turns, funny, shocking and compelling. But the writing is so clever and beautiful. I could read it again and again.

The voice of its narrator, a foetus, is splendidly sardonic.

Not only does he pull it off, he does so triumphantly, in the cleverest book I’ve read this year. It’s smart, dark and at times very funny.

A saucy, claustrophobic and darkly funny story which is all rather peculiar. Compulsive reading.

I devoured Ian McEwan’s latest very funny spin on Hamlet.

An ingenious rewrite of Hamlet as a murder story in which a foetus is detective and possible victim.

This is McEwan at his most playfully provocative.

A clever conceit, elegantly wrought, economically constructed.

A bewitching ode to humanity’s beauty, longing and selfishness.

A gripping piece of fiction.

I was hooked from the first page.

[A] smart, eloquent novel.

A enthralling read from one of the world’s master storytellers.

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