A mighty novel.

Remarkable… May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times

Thrilling and enigmatic

Snarling, effervescent and ambitious… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling

Jacobson…goes from strength to strength.

Very little about Jacobson’s circuitous romance-cum-murder mystery is straightforward – other than its originality and its devastating brilliance.

A dystopia that invites comparison with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Mystifying, serious and blackly funny.

To say J is unlike any other novel Jacobson has written would be misleading: the same ferocious wit runs throughout… That said, comparisons do not do full justice to Jacobson’s achievement in what may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times.

A snarling, effervescent and ambitious philosophical work of fiction… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling.

Jacobson once jokingly referred to himself as a Jewish Jane Austen. Here he reinvents himself as a Jewish Aldous Huxley – and displays mastery in the role.

Jacobson has crafted an immersive, complex experience with care and guile.

J is a remarkable achievement: an affecting, unsettling – and yes, darkly amusing – novel.

A provocatively dystopian novel that depicts a disturbingly nice world.

Sufficient testament to a writer who is…producing some of his most powerful work.

A subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel.

You can’t help feeling that this is an important book, and it’s hugely compelling… Worthy of its status as a Booker long-listee.

Jacobson’s most significantly Jewish book and quite possibly his masterpiece.

The persistent reader will be duly rewarded, as the denouement reveals a hidden logic and the book climaxes with a brilliant literary (and philosophical) coup.

Contemporary literature is overloaded with millenarian visions of destroyed landscapes and societies in flames, but Jacobson has produced one that feels frighteningly new by turning the focus within: the ruins here are the ruins of language, imagination, love itself.

The savagery of his imagery and his conclusions are impossible to forget, and maybe even to deny.

Confounds expectations but confirms Jacobson’s reputation.

I loved this book. A compelling tale that is bound to be a hot contender for the Booker.

Impressive, disturbingly timely – a massive step aside and a noticeable step up from most of his other fiction.

A pivotal – and impressive change of direction for [Jacobson].

Sentence by sentence, he remains perhaps the best British author around.

This is Jacobson at his provocative, surprising, brilliant best.

Thrilling written and the most ambitious work on the shortlist… Once you’ve worked out what’s going on, you’ll be gripped by its hints of an anti-Semitic armageddon.

It’s stark and daring.

A brilliant conspiracy yarn examining the manipulation of collective memory.

It's not just the subject of this book that will shock Jacobson fans, its distinct narrative style also comes as a surprise. A pleasant one at that.

A dystopian vision, haunting and memorable

It’s a triumph of creative writing. I finished it and started it again

Jacobson has written a subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel

chilling and provocative, Jacobson is at the height of his powers here

Hadley, who won the Hawthornden prize this month for The Past, is literary fiction’s best kept secret. Don’t let her fellow novelists keep her for themselves.

[The Past is] magnificently done: half celebration, half elegy.

There are hints of Larkin in her tender descriptions of landscape and imaginative responses to the ineffable… All her books are wonderful.

This is a hugely enjoyable and keenly intelligent novel, brimming with the vitality of unruly desire.