Powerful, heartbreaking, heart-racing, terrifying . . . It is impossible not to find yourself racing through the pages

Atmospheric and beautifully written. Gretel and the Dark will be one of the best books of 2014

Dark and intriguing . . . a highly clever, original book

Ambitious and enticing

Truly beautiful writing. Read this book

A back-and-forth tale of secrets and imagination, a thoroughly engaging journey into the darkest corners of humanity

As dark and twisting as the Black Forest . . . forbidding, secretive, richly historical, this is a gripping novel that will leave you guessing until the end

This combination of history, mystery and fairy tale makes for engrossing and irresistible reading - right up to the ultimately redemptive final twist

Grips and shakes the reader from beginning to end. Like so many fairy tales, nothing is what it seems and attention must be paid for the greatest rewards

Wow. It's dark indeed, but within that darkness is a redemptive story, as beautiful as it is haunting. Deeply, achingly satisfying

Deserves to be placed alongside other greats of the genre such as The Reader and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. I urge you to read it.

Extraordinary. Granville's writing and world building are beautiful.

Pick this book up and read it!

McCarthy's writing is cool and elegant, descriptive, yet informal and conversational.

An intellectually challenging and highly engaging work of art.

It is dead-clever, very funny, insanely ambitious, sometimes insane, essentially brilliant and commendably engaged with the way we’re living our lives right now.

Reading a McCarthy novel is like being in a McCarthy novel: everything is part of a fizzing network, the scope of which can never be fully apprehended.

Without beginning, middle, end – and especially lacking centre! – the novel comes to a halt, leaving the reader in a gorgeous daze of symbol and cypher, whose meaning is so clear, and yet tantalizingly opaque.

Satin Island is clever, vogue, slick and sleek.

Packed with intriguing and intellectual ideas… refreshingly thought-provoking.

Slender, foxily postmodern.

The bleeding edge of science fiction is Satin Island.

In Satin Island the narrator, U, takes us on a journey through the modern world of ideas, theories and references. It’s a wonderfully intense experience – as soon as I’d finished I wanted to read it again.

Convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists.

Favourite novel of 2015.

A darkly funny and disturbing meditation on the intricacies and insubstantiality of our technology-ridden times. McCarthy is one of the most daring, most ambitious and most subtle of what at my age I can all the younger generation of writers.

The novel often reads like a dramatic monologue, a very modern stream of consciousness, akin to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake… McCarthy’s novel is innovative, well crafted and challenging… This novel is breaking new ground, a breath of fresh air, at times a tour de force.

McCarthy has put his finger on something, and he’s nailed it very precisely. It’s how we live now. All the information we process every day. What it’s doing to us.

As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved herself an author well worth watching out for

Profoundly moving