In the various layers of a slick, enjoyable plot, the glossy surface finish never distracting from the messiness beneath, art reflects life and also reflects itself… There is wit and entertainment aplenty… What brings it all delightfully together is Quinn’s flawless, easy-going prose. He never once puts a foot wrong… Clever, certainly, but in just the right measure.

Powered by a satisfactorily pacy plot and oiled by Quinn’s effortless prose, this is a book that slips down as easily as a gin-and-it, but larger questions lurk beneath its polished surface… Eureka… is in glorious Technicolor.

Quinn’s prose is elegant and his eye for the evocative details of social history acute as he chronicles the pleasures and perils inherent in Nat’s pursuit of love and art.

A cast of wonderfully vivid characters ducks and dives its way through London’s beau monde… There is something Evelyn Waugh-like about Eureka, not just it its depictions of the escapades that privilege can afford, but in the ease and seeming effortlessness of Quinn’s prose… Few eras have been as well documented, but Eureka succeeds in bringing it to life in a new and hugely entertaining way.

Anthony Quinn’s growing series of period novels about London life is fast becoming one of contemporary fictions most dependable pleasures… Quinn offers sexual intrigue and a class-crossing mystery plot straddling the glitzy and grimy, all told with a rampantly infectious sense of fun.

Quinn’s immersive approach to his historical fiction means we’re soon woozy with the sounds and sights of that significant year when the Beatles changed music history, homosexuality was decriminalised and cinema was playing with our minds.

Quinn isn’t as big as he should be; with luck, this zesty, punchy, yet also hard-edged black comedy will give him the readership he deserves.

A hugely entertaining read set in London’s Swinging Sixties.

Swinging London and its inhabitants come alive under the expert touch of Anthony Quinn, who always finds the dark heart of the story.

Some of the characters in Anthony Quinn’s novel have appeared in his earlier fiction. They have a richness and depth that come from his long familiarity with them and here they are placed in a tale that brilliantly evokes the febrile world of sixties London.

Immersive and compelling.

This pleasingly melancholic romp gallivants towards a dark mystery.

London is lovingly and precisely rendered… Eureka plays with cinema, literature…art and music, with the newly released Sergeant Pepper echoing through the pages. It fully inhabits its chosen era, steering clear of period cliché while celebrating the touchstones of the decade, from kaftans and kohl to acid and arthouse. Quinn crafts fully realized characters and allows them to enjoy themselves thoroughly, in a highly entertaining novel.

Witty, dark and quite brilliant

As you'd expect from award-winning Moran, this book is brash, razor-sharp and full of heart

Stylishly mad

A book to get lost in.

Orange’s fiery debut… There There is at once a poetic and suspenseful page-turner and a subtle condemnation of a shameful history

Exhilarating and polyphonic, with a Tarantino-esque climax, it is also a powerful meditation on history, culture and identity

There There…[is] hugely impressive, a brilliantly conceived and written first novel

[There There] tackles poverty, sexuality, identity and the decline and desire for community. It's Orange's ability to carve out such small and quiet moments in the stifled domestic strands of his complicated story and then such magnitude in the breadth of the overarching topic…which makes this novel so frightening, so hopeful and so powerful

Orange is an extremely skilful writer; each narrative voice he creates is completely distinctive and it is a wonder that this novel was written by a single writer

Her stirring story celebrates the joys of self-discovery and the essential truth that family is ours to define

Tyler's bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humour, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community – and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal

I never look at a family, or a couple in a car, or a funeral cortege without thinking: "I wonder what's going on there." That's what Anne Tyler teaches you: never judge a cover until you've read its book

Tyler captures the quiet turmoil of family life with the utmost discretion, knowing that to understand it is not the same as being able to subordinate it

Rigorously intelligent, quietly funny and very precise about words

A beautifully observed portrait of one woman’s quiet quest for identity and purpose

Clock Dance is moving, funny acute… This is a beautifully structured work of fiction, full of narrative tension, which moves towards a fine diminuendo, followed by a crisis of possibility

A lovely novel following the author’s usual theme of hope and regret, renewal and contentment

Tyler has the ability to bring character to life in just a few sentences

Anne Tyler’s astute new novel Clock Dance is fuelled by kindness, kindness that begins tentatively with false starts and blind spots and grows into the extravagant all-encompassing sort

I loved Clock Dance

Warmly appealing and sharply observant...combines comic relish with psychological and social shrewdness. Characters pulse with lifelikeness. Dialogue crackles with authenticity. Changes brought about by time are fascinatedly and fascinatingly observed

A moving, often spiky study of relationships and the far-reaching effects of trauma

A thought-provoking story that resonates with emotional depth

Moshfegh’s characters are often so funny in and about their unhappiness that we don’t want them to escape it, or not yet… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is written in multiple modes at once: comedy and tragedy and farce, blurring into one another, climbing on top of one another.

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel.

I love this book. It's funny, I find it intriguing and Moshfegh has a dark voice. I started reading her and thought, 'This sounds like a female Bret Easton Ellis'.

Enthralling. The voice is compelling and witty, drawing one into the experience.

The black comedy draws you in and the mysteries, twists and turns keep you there.

Whip-smart and bleakly funny.

The most inspiring novel of recent years.

Depressing, dystopian, dry and dark, but also strangely comforting and full of the joy of innocent fantasy of withdrawing from a hostile world.

Moshfegh's stunning 2018 novel has a haunting ending... [and] relentlessly vicious humour.

This razor sharp satirical novel has achieved near mythical status... [a] compelling and clever take on a female character that isn't afraid to speak her mind

Ottessa is one of our newest, most dazzling, daring and outrageous voices in literature

A very compelling read… hilarious and depressing and rage-inducing in equal measures.

Absorbing.

Lyrical, bleakly comic and, ultimately, intensely affecting

It is a necessary and compelling book, and this year’s must read

Rachel Kushner’s exhaustive research into what goes on within these walls

Kushner’s high-definition, high-impact prose is as electrifying as it is daring

The momentum of the novel resides in its prose, the spring and sass of a voice so vivid it can largely dispense with the mechanics of plot

A salty and hilarious novel from one of America's best living novelists.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room should be a favourite [to win the Man Booker Prize]. If you like your escapism as gritty as it gets, prepare to be hooked by this unflinching account of a female prisoner serving a double life sentence... The Mars Room is rarely easy reading, but the furore of voices and violence and injustice throws you right into the story and keeps you immersed there.

Kushner’s novel is a timely reminder that a country’s authoritarian tendencies can be most easily measured by the number of people it deems unworthy of freedom

Rachel Kushner knows how to sniff out a good character.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room immerses you in the life of a high-security women’s prison in California, its central character Romy – accused of killing her stalker – both gritty and fragile. This was not a subject I thought would grip me, but in Kushner’s firm hands I was entranced. Much of the book is autobiographical – while never in prison herself, Kushner was the daughter of Beatniks and allowed to roam the dodgier areas of San Francisco as a teenager. The characters range from bullet-headed killers to a well-meaning male teacher whose ambiguities are brilliantly done. Romy’s trans friend Conan, “shoulders as broad as the aisle, and a jawline beard”, is delightfully free of the politically correct, while the style veers excitingly from straight narrative to scribbled lists like whimpers of despair.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room was a hot favourite on this year's Booker shortlist, and it's easy to see why… Kushner's atmospheric writing is compelling to the last.

Kushner’s writing is the most marvellous I read this year… time and again I found myself rereading paragraphs of The Mars Room for her perfectly turned sentences, the music of her prose

[A] brilliantly compelling read