A force of nature ... a life-enhancing talent

His paragraphs are unnoticeably beautiful, his heart always on show, and he writes with a social accuracy that is devastating

Compelling and heartbreaking . . beautiful, yet simple and utterly convincing

Cements Ryan as the sharpest chronicler of modern Irish life

Painfully moving ... Ryan’s work has set a benchmark to which other writers will aspire.

Clear-eyed and moving.

A powerful and touching meditation on loneliness and isolation . . . Ryan continues to establish himself as an important voice in recording contemporary Ireland.

Powerful . . . Ryan is clearly committed to his subject and possesses the insight and empathy to illuminate the heart of the matter.

Ryan is a remarkably good chronicler of contemporary Irish life

Ryan holds you to the page by the sheer force of his language ... If you’re interested in the state of Irish fiction now, pick up a copy of this book.

Displaying again his exceptional gift for pinning a voice to the page, Ryan transforms Johnsey’s self-torturing internal soundtrack into something that’ll have you alternately cringing, cheering and laughing.

Ryan’s urgent, poetic prose captures the internal distress of his main character with forensic intensity. . . . a testament to this brightest of new writing talents. . . . Ryan has risen to the challenge of his second novel admirably. Recommended.

Powerful writing that certainly cements Ryan’s status as the newly crowned king of what the Irish Times has dubbed “recession lit”.

Ian McEwan's latest novel, Machines Like Me, is a topsy-turvy tour de force.

The novel is as honed and well constructed as one would expect from McEwan… a sleek and streamlined work by a master technician.

Ian McEwan has always been a generous writer to his readers, his novels bulging with big ideas and rich story-telling… [it’s] hard not to admire the sheer scale of McEwan’s ambition. Many literary novels claim to be exploring ‘what it is to be human’. Few carry out this exploration as thoroughly, or as literally, as [Machines Like Me] does.

McEwan teases out the ethical dilemmas of this storyline with his customary verve… [Machines Like Me is] effortlessly readable and fizzing with ideas.

McEwan returns with another ambitious, high-concept work... [exploring] some very timely moral dilemmas.

Adam, an eerily ambiguous presence throughout, proves a highly effective conduit for McEwan to channel all sorts of interesting questions concerning sexual consent, the burden of knowledge, the collapse of the borders between public and private and whether humans or machines are better equipped to behave ethically.

Machines Like Me is ultimately about the age-old question of what makes people human. The reader is left baffled and beguiled.

McEwan gives the whole subject of artificial intelligence a thorough and fascinating examination… a rich and thought-provoking read.

Gripping.

In [Machines Like Me], McEwan has taken his creativity into a subversive alternative 1980s London… the young couple at the centre of McEwan’s story find out the danger in inventing things beyond our control.

Machines Like Me feels like a novel about empathy, and the artificial limits we set on it – by race, by gender, by geographical location – so that we can sleep at night in a world of cruelty and horror.

Machines Like Me is deeply intriguing, a little unnerving and quite captivating… [it] will leave you questioning, and imagining how our not too distant future might look.

Ian McEwan is one of our most venerated living writers… [in Machines Like Me] McEwan shrewdly touches upon the intricacies of artificial intelligence.

McEwan’s prose is, as expected, nuanced, thoughtful and beguiling.

It wasn’t going to be long before [McEwan] swooped upon the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence… Wonderful… [McEwan] pose[s] all sorts of questions about humanity.

Machines Like Me is elegantly constructed, the sentences are consistently lovely, and the character dynamics…compelling.

McEwan knows how to fashion a twisty and pacy narrative, to keep us alive to the possibility that what we’re reading…is not all that it seems.

McEwan muses on love, empathy and the morality and ethics of artificial intelligence… very good.

An important literary contribution to the AI debate, one of the great questions of our time.

Precisely rendered and well observed… [McEwan] neatly delineates humanity’s remorseless self-demotion from the centre of the universe to flotsam.

[An] undeniably another excellent novel from McEwan, who demonstrates that he can conjure up challenging characters, witty dialogue and moral ambiguity when dealing with sex robots just as brilliantly as he does on literary turf.

Dexterous, utterly gripping and intensely thought-provoking.

Deeply unnerving… What starts out as a darkly funny ménage à trois becomes an unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever.

The latest novel from my favourite author tackles the subjects of artificial intelligence and what it is to be human. He does this in a surprising, original way, and Adam, the strong, seductive “robot”, is a character that will haunt me for a long time.

[This] new, gripping, beautifully written and constructed, disturbing, and provocative novel…is a thrilling read… the chilling conclusions that hyper-rationalism can come to are brilliantly described.

McEwan maintains his status as a master of fiction.

A new collection of stories that explores the complex - and often darkly funny - connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

Ian McEwan’s sublimely playful new novel transports you back to the Eighties but with some major changes, including eerily life-like robots… Dark and slyly funny, it’ll also give your brain a workout.

Enright shows real insight and perception when it comes to family relationships. It’s a well-structured and well-paced narrative.

Written with raw and brutal honesty, this is one to savour.

Enright’s writing is sharp and lucid and full of beautiful phrases and descriptions.

I love Enright’s style and the spidering out of the siblings’ lives.

There is beauty and darkness, hypocrisy and humility; it wouldn’t be an Irish novel without them.

The Green Road, about one Irish family, confronts all that is essential: love, death, mothers and our own flawed selves. It is written with a kind of tenderness, beauty and insight that transmogrifies humdrum experience into the epiphanic and back again.

Blisteringly funny and keenly perceptive.

Deeply affecting, crackling with wit, and consistently magnificent.

A globe-trotting, kaleidoscopic portrait of Irish siblings and their difficult mother.

A magnificent novel about family and belonging told in stark yet sparkling prose.

A fierce, funny, loosely woven family saga.

[A] darkly glinting novel of family life.

A bravura example of shifting voices and perspectives, all of which benefit from Enright’s splendid prose and careful restraint.

Enright dissects [her character’s] foibles with warmth, wit and a bracing lack of sentimentality.

A book you don’t put down until it is finished, dragging you right into the heart of another Irish family as only Anne Enright can.

A family saga, beginning with intense and beautifully detailed character studies.

I... enjoyed The Green Road for the dialogue, the clever narrative structure, and the gnarled, contemporary sense of family values.

I could not put it down. Chapter two is a masterpiece.

Stylish prose that charts the fortunes and misfortunes of this family over a period of 25 years.

In this brilliant, captivating novel, the poised, impossible and always disappointed matriarch Rosaleen Madigan makes life difficult for her children at a Christmas gathering.

Few Novelists pick apart domestic relationships with the poetry and precision of Anne Enright.

Sharp yet oh so subtle storytelling […] this is an author at the height of her formidable powers.

An exquisitely written portrait of a family, and a country, on the cusp of enormous change.

Exquisitely written and hugely enjoyable.

A brilliant approach to the sadness of a disconnected family, who are like satellites out of sync.

Enright’s virtuosic tale of an Irish family- the Madigans- across continents and decades withholds closure but doesn’t skimp on pleasure

A compelling novel, full of astute observations, beautifully written, sometimes stark and other times aching with longing

The sweep of the book and Anne Enright's way fo pulling this global migratuon story together with such energy and detail puts her in somewhere beside Toni Morrison

Heart-wrenching novel… The surgical precision of Enright’s writing makes you feel that she can, in Wordsworth’s words, “see into the life of things”. There is a singing simplicity to it that tugs at your heart…A masterly work.

Beautifully observed. Enright is a great writer.

Bold and brilliant.

Incredible… I’m totally captivated.

An evocative story about family ties and belonging.

A brilliant read.

A story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion.

Sharply funny portrait of an Irish family meeting for a final Christmas.

Within pages I was wrapped in the warmth of Enright’s prose… This is a beautiful book… Enright is unquestionably a fantastic writer who, for me with this novel, conjured up the world of a family with all its highs and lows that felt like they might be having this reunion down the end of your road… Enright does two of my favourite things in fiction. She makes the ordinary, and everything we take for granted, seem extra ordinary. She also gives voices to those who have not been able to share their tales… The writing is stunning.

An evocative story about family ties and belonging. Anne Enright is deservedly a well-respected writer.

Enright's novels are fantastically well-crafted, eloquent and funny… Each character is beautifully realized… She finds unexpected adjectives, brilliantly exact description, the spot-on emotion. Her writing is lyrical but always unsentimental. There is pleasure in reading every paragraph, and an enormous wisdom throughout the pages.

Truly wonderful… The dialogue is particularly brilliant… It completely envelops you in the story and will leave you wanting more.

Wonderful… The dialogue is particularly brilliant, capturing all the barbed snappiness of dinner with siblings.

I fell headfirst into the beautifully written prose of this novel, so authentic and charming in its telling of one Irish family over more than two decades. Each vibrant character gets a turn in almost short stories of their own that feel almost like entities in their own right. I adored it.

A resonant, masterly work.

[An] exceptional novel.

This is a flawless book, it’s utterly flawless… It has just touched so many other readers. This book is heartbreaking… A beautiful examination of unhappy families… The power of Anne’s writing is you all see a reflection of your own family…it’s tender and it’s beautiful and deserves to be widely read.

Enright is undoubtedly one of our most prominent novelists