Powerfully brings home the fears of living life on the edge...a narrative rich in intimacy and immediacy...Berriman is a former primary school teacher, and her acute awareness of the child’s world, as well as the spot-on grinding details of poverty make this book wholly, painfully authentic...challenging but always compelling; for the entirety of the second half, I was desperate to rescue Jesika and her family.
Comparisons to Room by Emma Donoghue are inevitable; however, while Room is a novel about one sick individual robbing a family of hope and dignity, Home tells the far more terrifying story of inequality in our society..

Packs a huge emotional punch…heartbreaking ... Jesika is entirely engaging, sweet, emphatic and cross as she tries to interpret the grisliness of the grown-up world.

I read this in one sitting and am still crying. Tina and Jesika are heroes. A brave, important, heart-breaking book

Amanda Berriman's Home kept me up late for all the right reasons. It's a tender portrait of a family in crisis that nevertheless grips like a thriller, a chronicle of extraordinary events that never slides into sensationalism. I loved Jesika - the girl through whose eyes the story is told - and her mother, who in remarkable times also faces the unremarkable challenges of motherhood we can all identify with.

‘Home’ is an extraordinary achievement. Jesika is utterly unique yet it also feels like there is a chorus of children’s voices behind her, telling their story too. It’s an important story to hear. A must-read from an exceptional new writer.
Totally compelling. I read this behind my fingers and couldn’t put it down until I knew if Jesika was safe or not. An important reminder about what the world looks like from a child’s perspective.

I’m not sure I breathed while reading this. Jesika jumps off the page and into your heart. She will stay with me forever.

Jesika is so real and unforgettable … An extraordinary book.

There’s nothing more heart-stopping than a child in danger. Mandy Berriman skilfully takes you by the hand into some bleak territory, all too common for many of today’s children. A need-to-read novel.

HOME is an incredibly brave novel that never shies away from the harsh realities of poverty.

Written in the style of Emma Donoghue's Room this is a sensitive and thought-provoking novel. It's told through the innocent eyes of four-year-old Jesika, who lives below the poverty line in a small flat, with her mother Tina. But when Jesika befriends Paige, she is told a troubling secret that could destroy this already struggling family forever.

It's a challenge not to become completely engrossed

[A] thought-provoking novel about a section of society that's so easily overlooked

A sensitive novel ... told through the innocent lens of four-year-old Jesika. It's a challenge to not become completely engrossed and concerned for her family's wellbeing.

Amanda Berriman's heart-wrenching tale of a family on the edge

The crepuscular, dreamlike, post-1945 London that Michael Ondaatje invents in his novel Warlight continues to haunt you long after the plot itself.

A dark adult fairy tale where nothing is as it seems… Ondaatje’s magical mystery tour makes for an exceptionally entertaining literary journey.

Place your bets - with this glorious new book... Ondaatje could be in line for another Booker.

Haunting… [Ondaatje] casts a magical spell, as he takes you into his half-lit world of war and love, death and loss, and the dark waterways of the past.

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… because of the powerful atmosphere Ondaatje invokes of unease, disquiet and the unknown. It’s a masterful book.

Ondaatje’s spare and evocative prose perfectly captures the crumbled austerity of post-war London… this is easily his most satisfying and seductive novel in years.

[There is a] fragile, haunting, almost whispered quality [to] Ondaatje’s writing… So finely constructed are his sentences that you find yourself holding your breath lest you inadvertently disturb their symmetry.

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating… It does not stroke the chin of its own wisdom, but allows meaning and poignancy to accumulate through inference and feint. In simple terms, it is an alluring narrative of character and incident told by a powerful storyteller.

Skilfully navigating espionage, betrayal and deception, Warlight... takes [Ondaatje] deep into John le Carré territory… a lyrical but sinister mosaic of a hidden world.

Dazzling.

Warlight is Ondaatje’s most haunting novel after The English Patient… mesmerising.

A beautifully crafted work of fiction… [with a] stunning denouement.

This elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shifts of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful.

Lyrical but oblique, [Ondaatje’s] prose matches a mood of mystery and suspicion that tantalises.

[A] novel of shadowy brilliance.

The English Patient author Michael Ondaatje weaves another tale of love, loss and memory against a backdrop of World War II... The mysteries come together through a complex, non-linear narrative that revisits and revises each development with careful scrutiny.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight stood out this year for its skill in making even the most familiar fictional terrain seem strange and unsettling… every time we think we’ve pinned down what Ondaatje is doing in this novel, he somehow manages to wriggle free. It’s a quite brilliant act of fictional escapology.

It's suspenseful, intense, and Ondaatje's prose is beautiful.

Ondaatje brings to life this work…with meticulous detail

Ondaatje is a skillfully deliberate writer

Warlight not only shines a light into the shadowy wars…but also the uncertain age of adolescene

This seam of subterfuge and the truth being gradually released from the shadows make Warlight gripping reading… Ondaatje adorns the walls with his characters like a master gallerist

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war. It’s eerily prescient.

Hypnotic.

An exquisite, elegiac account of a life forged in the shadow of other people's secrets, told in language as feathery and delicate as a moth.

I look above all else in fiction for sureness of touch with sentences – and that was abundantly in evidence…in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight… [Warlight has] the unmistakable stamp of [the author] knowing exactly what [he’s] doing.

Ostensibly realistic, it is phantasmagoric… Everything he says bristles with improbable life. Reading it is like watching a movie in which, however much activity there is, the atmosphere dominates the plot

A meditative and dreamily lyrical espionage thriller

Ondaatje brings Warlight’s seemingly disparate fragments together with such skill that the ending feels not just satisfying but inevitable. The most lovely conjuring trick, it leaves you in awe of the magician. I emerged blinking into the glare of the 21st century, bereft in a way a novel hasn’t left me bereft for a longtime

Ondaatje’s onion of a novel, his first since 2011’s The Cat’s Table, combines rich intrigue with a meditation on how we rewrite our memories by examining them… a stunning return.

Magnificent.

Nothing in the world of this novel is ever redundant; nothing is accidental. Whenever you come across a striking detail…you can be sure it will crop up again, be charged with more significance, be joined with the rest of the story in a long chain of meaning.

Mesmerising.

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years is also one of his best – a quiet but profoundly powerful book… A superior, espionage novel about the unstable, shape-shifting nature of personal history.

The evocation of night journeys through the fog-bound city and along mysterious canals and forgotten rivers is spellbinding.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I’d pick it up again in a heartbeat.

Ondaatje’s prose is beautiful, and he successfully builds suspense and tension without seeming too heavy-handed

Michael Ondaatje is at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types

Brilliant dramatic tale

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating. Warlight is a meditation on the purpose and possibilities of storytelling

[T]his elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shift of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… It's a masterful book

- So finely are his sentences constructed that you find yourself holding your breath lest you inadvertently disturb their symmetry

[C]ompulsively and grippingly readable… Ondaatje is a marvelous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination

For the lyrical strength of the prose alone, a new Michael Ondaatje novel is always a treat

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war

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