The Kites is indeed a treasure, capable of accessing an enormous node of insight and almost-overwhelming beauty spliced with bittersweet candor... we are lucky to have it at last. We're going to need it.

This final work by a maverick genius of modern French fiction tells a story of love and war that's both charming and moving. It's a perfect introduction to the unique imagination of Romain Gary

Romain Gary has created a gallery of heroes who are willing to die for liberty but have to settle for the lesser victory of self-knowledge

A major literary star ... whose life was stranger than fiction

A rebel French writer ... a brilliant storyteller, a master craftsman and one of France's most original writers

What talent, most certainly, how many ideas and passions too. You seize us and shake us. Ah!

What a gold mine!

A truly beautiful novel

Gary is brilliant at capturing the existential emotion for which the title of "The Kites" is an obvious metaphor -- sky-bound yet tethered by that string.

More than a humorist, more than a storyteller, he's a moralist, an independent and significant student of the struggle to tell right from wrong, good conduct from bad. This struggle took place within a life that was, as people like to say, itself as good a story as any novel that he wrote

An extraordinary novel about lost love, memory, resistance to tyranny and individual lives caught up in the rush of history

What struck me the most on reading The Kites was the energy and fervour needed to write such a text at a time when the author was so close to ending his own life. How do you create such an explosion of life and love when you are overwhelmed with the desire to die? The Kites is a novel touched from beginning to end with grace, a great saga about the innate dignity of love that succeeds in the feat of being funny and poetic, tender and sharp, committed and fierce, with a touch of brilliance in the art of dialogue and situations that avoid the twofold temptation of sentimentality and moral lesson. He mixes the spirit of childhood with the acute intelligence of the mature man. He utilises frivolity and virtuous irony to give the tragedy of life its depth and greatness - and this eloquence, this taste for language and beauty in the shadow of death demonstrates the power of literature. So, after having mixed with a memorable crowd of truculent, touching, spectacular and comical characters, you finish the text with a lingering feeling of enchantment in spite of all the bereavements and adversities.

Bold, inventive, haunting... With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you'll be bowled over by it

The Water Cure is eerily still and pure - with saline bite... Mackintosh asks if it is the traumas of our pasts that ultimately pose the greatest threat to our futures

Powerfully unsettling, immensely assured, calmly devastating. It conjures a world both alien and familiar, exploring the physical and psychological cruelties enacted on women, by men, in the name of their protection, and the noble and ignoble uses to which anger can be put in a perverse world. This is a gem of a novel, and I was bowled over by it

Electric [and] beautifully strange... Her novel is an exercise in minimalism

A hypnotic read... This extraordinary debut is a feminist, quasi-dystopian read - great for fans of Hot Milk, The Girls and The Vegetarian

A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty. Sophie Mackintosh writes devastatingly well about the complexities that women face in loving men, and in loving each other

Uneasy, mythic, lawless... The atmospheric landscapes cloak trauma and violence in wisps of uncertainty, where bad feelings coalesce as both presciently felt and strangely unknowable

Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a utopia gone awry, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time

[A] lyrical debut, original and very atmospheric

Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book

Creepy and delightful, a portrayal of post-apocalyptic puberty, intermingling desire and despair. It has a pinch of Shirley Jackson, a dash of chlorine, and an essence all of its own

Powerful, mythic, seductively sinister... Her alternative world is as carefully imagined as one of Margaret Atwood's... [Sophie Mackintosh] is a writer to be reckoned with

Eerie and unsettling, the novel exerts a hypnotic grip as the tension builds

A superb debut

The Water Cure deserves a Sofia Coppola-style big-screen treatment, although its cultish overtones and sinister denouement are as reminiscent of The Wicker Man as The Virgin Suicides

Gripping stuff

A satisfying page-turner

Page turner

Gripping, twisty and written with Koomson’s trademark brilliance, this is pure class

A real page turner

Love, loss, new beginnings and saying goodbye, it's all in here. A moving read

A terrific novel.

[Segal's] descriptions are spare and unerring; everyday family interactions are observed warmly and yet with precision

Evans' writing is like water; her sentences ebb and flow and change course, mirroring the Thames as it wends its way in and around the characters' lives

A masterpiece of modern living

An amazing book full of wisdom and empathy

An immersive look into friendship, parenthood, sex, and grief - as well as the fragility of love. It is told with such detail, you're left wanting more

Beautifully written and observed

Evans is extraordinarily good on the minutiae of grief, family, and the fragility of love

a lyrical portrait of modern London