Something in his prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I'd never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence.

It broke my heart and made me want to jump up and down, unable to fully articulate my own response towards it ... [A] notion of a shared humanity consumed Baldwin, and infused everything he did and wrote. Deprived of heritage and history, he borrowed freely and created his own unique language, with the cadences of the Bible and of jazz and Negro spirituals, and inflections of James, Dickens and Shakespeare ... This should, like J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, have been crowned as the Great American Novel.

A distinctive book, both realistic and brutal ... A novel of extraordinary poetry.

He had that flair for the extravagant and fantastic which has been an American characteristic from Irving and Poe to Dashiell Hammett

This is one of the most intellectually thrilling and beautifully unsettling novels I've read in years.

Like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Goodhouse is a gripping excursion to a vividly imagined and profoundly disturbing future. Peyton Marshall has written an unforgettable first novel, a work of striking originality, empathy and skill.

Goodhouse is a debut of extraordinary power and vision, and Peyton Marshall is a new voice for the ages.

Goodhouse grabbed me by the throat and lifted me off the ground and held me suspended there until its final sentence. Then the book began its real work on me: haunting my waking thoughts, invading my dreams. (...) This is an astonishing novel.

Magnificently written ...powerful

A fantastic cautionary tale that will leave you muttering "one more chapter" as the night stretches on. We highly recommend it

Minority Report meets Never Let Me Go

A terrifying, yet grimly realistic portrait of near-future America

Thought-provoking, and at times brutal, this thriller will surely be the basis of many discussions about the nature of society and the times we live in

Peyton Marshall is a writer of intelligence and keen observation with a great future. GOODHOUSE is a startling debut. In James, she has created a compelling and convincing hero for the all-too-probable dark times ahead

An eerie, compelling novel, its deceptively simple language is a 'slight rush of words' which hold much more than they seem capable of containing...This novel is about the need to create a story we can live with when the real story cannot be told...

Strout uses a different voice herself in this novel: a spare simple one, elegiac in tone that sometimes brings to mind Joan Didion's

This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it

An exquisitely written story...a brutally honest, absorbing and emotive read

Honest, intimate and ultimately unforgettable

Sympathetic, subtle and sometimes shocking

Plain and beautiful...Strout writes with an extraordinary tenderness and restraint

One of this year's best novels: an intense, beautiful book about a mother and a daughter, and the difficulty and ambivalence of family life

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz

Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is the best novel I've read for some time

An exquisite novel of careful words and vibrating silences

In this quiet, well observed novel, a mother and her mysteriously ill daughter rebuild their relationship in a New York hospital room. Deft and tender, it lingers in the mind

A worthy follow-up to Olive Kitteridge

I loved My Name is Lucy Barton: she gets better with each book

The standout novel of the year - a visceral account of the relations between mother and daughter and the unreliability of memory

In a brilliant year for fiction, I've admired the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly