A beautiful, strange novel about drab, dangerous lives. Kay's imagination is exuberant, her language musical and her narrative both fantastically intricate and structurally sound

A brilliant and sad book… The funniest book I’ve read in years.

A valorous and magnificent novel

Compelling

An astonishingly enjoyable debut ... Mountains of the Moon does everything that novels can do, and does them in a very original way

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