The sheer volume of invention in Deacon King Kong commands awe...And the sentences! The prose radiates a kind of chain-reaction energy.

Deacon King Kong is full of heart, humor, and compassion...I say we give him another National Book Award for this one. It's that good.

Deacon King Kong reaffirms James McBride's position among the greatest American storytellers of our time.

Hilarious...A rich and vivid multicultural history.

Perhaps you wouldn't expect your next great read to be a sort of comic opera set in a Brooklyn housing project circa 1969 starring a drink-addled church deacon named Sportcoat, his best friend Hot Sausage and a melancholic amateur gardener with mafia ties known as the Elephant. Best put on your seat belt, because McBride (The Good Lord Bird, Five-Carat Soul) will take you on a fast, funny, farcical ride.

McBride is operating in the realm of social allegory, a lineage that extends back through generations of writers: Ralph Ellison, Terry Southern, Darius James. Like them, he telegraphs his intentions through the use — or better yet, the reinvention — of history, which as Deacon King Kong progresses becomes a kind of floating opera, touching but not always overlapping with events as they occurred.

Deacon King Kong cements McBride as a master storyteller.

Dazzling, spiritually rich.

Peopled with wondrously quirky and charismatic individuals...both hilarious and affecting, the patter a treat, and in wise, drunk, old Sportcoat James McBride has given us a character for the ages.

I loved this book . . . It triumphs because it takes a risk . . . We find ourselves hurtling towards an ending that is surprising, satisfying, subversive . . . Deeply affecting.

Nolan's raw and uncannily insightful writing glimmers in a way that will shed new light onto wounds both healed and open

Acts of Desperation . . . ruthlessly peels back the ego to expose the soul's most discomfiting corners . . . [and] illuminates the fragile tension between power and desire.

Nolan's writing gleams with dark precision . . . What Acts of Desperation illuminates best is the chasm, sadly still enormous, between feminist politics and personal predicaments of love, sex and romance.

Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel is a love story like no other.

This is an incredible debut . . . Poignant, poetic, raw and utterly unique - I couldn't stop reading. Pre-order it now.

Remarkable . . . a stunning meditation on the ways in which society moulds female desire . . . Lyrical and raw, Acts of Desperation is a vital intervention into the genre.

Nolan's ability to illustrate the rawest thoughts, neurosis and murky emotions is unrivalled. It's a read that will get inside your core.

One of the most anticipated books of the year . . . Lives up to the hype.

A darkly rich and heady exploration of hunger and unraveling, Acts of Desperation is unashamed and honest. It questions the truest way to inhabit a body and shows us the horror and the beauty in learning to be alone.

A gripping story of romance gone wrong . . . It delves deep into the subtle psychology behind the temptation to return to something you know is not right for you.

Is Acts of Desperation the next Normal People? An 'exhilarating' debut from a young Irish author . . . interrogates what it means to be a woman addicted to love.

[A] gripping debut novel... The writing is fearless and gut punching... Love, pain and pleasure are so closely entwined that it's almost impossible to extrapolate which one is feeding the other.

A stunning book.

Nolan's narrator rips and picks at the threads and scabs of desire, hedonism and self-worth... in this searing first novel, Nolan is holding up a fantastically intense mirror to her protagonist and letting us make up our own mind about whether or not we will look away.

There are flashes of brilliance throughout, reminiscent of John Berger.

Acts of Desperation creates an immersive experience of toxic romance through a suffocating and addictive narrative.

Painful, sharp and absorbing.

A reflection on compulsion, addiction and what it's like to exist as a young woman in a world that is hostile to you. Read the first page and you won't be able to stop.

Nolan...stakes out thrilling new territory in an intense, unflinching novel that is always intelligent and utterly unafraid of ugliness.

A devastating stripping back of the gendered and politicised conditions that shape desire, a revelation of the unnerving ways we are made vulnerable to others in unequal systems. Its crisp, knowing prose is unparalleled, its anger remarkable.

Nolan's intelligent, elegant first novel, a gripping portrait of love turned toxic.

The star feature of Nolan's narration is her ability to cut through received ideas about women, relationships and even rape. Her headlong, fearless prose, feels like salt wind on cracked lips. You wince and you thrill.

A raw read of vulnerability, desperation, and most definitely a new voice in fiction

A thrilling read...if you want a visceral, honest, unputdownable summer read then this is it. You'll devour it in a day.

A very elegant novel, with coercive control at the core. She has such a strong voice and not a sentence is extraneous

I read this in one go... I found it raw, honest, brutal and real.

Written with acerbic style and wit, this is an intoxicatingly good look at romantic obsession, delusion and desire.

Beautifully written…and the short chapters keep things moving at an addictively fast pace. Most importantly, it’s shamelessly real