Once the reader has gone past the first chapter - no, first page - his chances of putting down the book are small

The Raw Man is an extraordinary novel, and a work of rare conception, bringing together, within one individual, the painfully conflicted history of southern Africa

A fantastically imaginative and enjoyable book

Unapologetically ambitious and suffused with a rare emotional intensity

Clark’s novel is rich and strange… It is difficult not to admire its scope and verve, and not to be keen to know what its author does next

Clark's novel is compelling and beautiful, as it weaves together folklore and fantasy, history and myth into a complex tale of family, racial identification and storytelling

Strange, melancholic, and lyrical, The Raw Man is a novel that will live long in the memory

The whodunit is a mere pretext for witty debate

Subtle, funny and chilling, this delicious novel of music and murder unfolds among composers and critics of the 1910s and 1920s. Stace plays his deadly variations with real brio in a richly entertaining performance

A baroque intellectual thriller, wittily erudite and psychologically acute. Jessold joins Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn and Randall Jarrell's Gottfried Rosenbaum in the gallery of memorable composers in fiction

Imaginative and transporting, but entirely unfussy and unsentimental, the novel is written with a glint in the eye that gives it that extra bit of wind beneath its wings