Angelmaker is another cracking book from Nick Harkaway. It’s a mix of sci-fi, steampunk, adventure and romance and the mix of genres work really well together … Harkaway’s Angelmaker is a brilliant piece of escapism. It’s a wonderful example of how an irreverent approach to much loved genres can lead to a truly great story.

Splendid cornucopia of a novel

This brilliant, boundless mad genius of a book runs on its own frenetic energy, and bursts with infinite wit, inventive ambition and damn fine storytelling. You finish reading it in gape-mouthed awe and breathless admiration, having experienced something very special indeed.

You're in for a treat... Dickens meets Mervyn Peake in a modern Mother London.

“In a gravelly yet gleeful voice, Weyman narrates this swashbuckling genre-blend of spies, gangsters, and a doomsday machine. The lavish and imaginative story of Joe Spork, a clockmaker out of his depth as he attempts to save the world, is brilliantly realized through Weyman’s attention to inflection, characterization and pacing.”

Few 350-page, first-person novels - even fewer contemporary British novels - are unputdownable. This is one of them

A startling debut

Sincere, resolute

This extraordinary and quite brilliant first novel describes a life that is bumping along the very bottom...The writing is wonderfully inventive, encompassing grim reality and wild, romantic fantasy, and the true magic lies in the way the author manages to present the fragments as a funny, charming, beautiful whole

Remarkable story

The most original book I have read for quite a long time

Riverting ... both disturbing and entertaining, with twisted low-life chracters rivalling any created by Martin Amis or Nicola Barker

Sounds like a must-read

Utterly remarkable…sad in its depth, but delightful on the shimmering surface… It might only be February, but there's going to need to be some strong competition in the months to come if this doesn't end up being my book of the year

A wonderful survivor’s story… It’s excellent

This book is spooky, erotic and evocative. We loved it.

It is time we stopped thinking of the historical novel as a genre, and an inferior one at that. If its ostensible subject matter means that it doesn't attempt to tell us how we live now, nevertheless a novel set back in time may, if it is good, say as much about what it is to be alive as one set in the next street or another country today. Tides of War is such a novel. It is diverting, but not a diversion

A well written, engaging read...beautifully observed

A vivid account of a couple of years in the Peninsula Campaign and a sympathetic portrait of those left behind

A delicious novel by an experienced author who captures the scientific atmosphere of the early 19th century with a devastating study of infidelity

The real life players of the Napoleonic era spring to life

Compelling

Highly assured and almost educational with its broad sweep of history

Tillyard’s achievement is in this original portray log the Regency era and its relevance to our own time

a very human tale about passion, secrets and lies.

An achingly brilliant piece of writing on passion and delusion. It's a pleasure to read from start to finish and reignites our love for fiction