This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated by Flora Drew

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction

A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated

In scene after scene of black satire, lyric tenderness and desolating tragedy…this fearless epic of history and memory establishes the exiled Ma Jian as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s forgetful drive towards world-domination’

Monumental...riveting. This vivid, pungent, often blackly funny book is a mighty gesture of remembrance against the encroaching forces of silence

Powerful and exhilirating... Simultaneously a large-scale portrait of citizens writing in the grip of the party and the state and a strikingly intimate study of the fragility of the body and the persistence of self and memory

A modern literary masterpiece ... Ma Jian has created an intense, passionate and painful-to-read parable for today.. The elegant and bravura writing of Ma Jian is utterly convincing

This book is an intriguing, mysterious story of loneliness, heartbreak, and how you can learn from others’ mistakes.

The Tragedy Paper has the earmarks of what will one day be a true literary classic . . . LaBan brings to life a rich cast of characters, each struggling with their own definitions of a 'tragedy' and the trials of adolescence and growing up.

Escape with this mystery that will keep you searching for the answer to: what really happened? . . . This page-turner is told from Tim and Duncan's perspectives as Duncan finds the key to writing the biggest, most scandalous Tragedy Paper of all Irving School history. Trust us when we say a school assignment has never been this intense!

The story is perfect . . . the writing is simply outstanding . . . this was an absolutely gorgeous story to read.

The book is magnificent, understated, full of gentle mind grenades

Funny and rich and dirty and taut and original. I wanted it to be my biography, but there was way more warmth and invention in it than you could fit in a lifetime

Funny, sad, bewildering and painfully honest, it’s a must-read for all fans of Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine

Funny and true

What a beautifully written first novel. Joe Stretch has a way with words that is intensely captivating… Superb on adolescence, the Nineties, and more

A consistently amusing hymn to unfulfilled potential which grows more involving and poignant as it goes on

Jim is such a likeable character, unflinchingly recounting in all his worst failures and humiliations

A funny, wryly observed coming-of-age novel, it will strike a chord with anyone who grew up during the Noughties. It’s full of quirky period details and Jim is an engaging narrator