I’d like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith’s work. I’d like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity... The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete... This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass — provided by friends, influences, collaborators — stays steady.

A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness.

Danez Smith has always been the most talented voice of our generation, but it’s here, in their third collection, that their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitiousness of their heart. Here, they’ve built a table big enough to hold all of it: the small shames that accompany grief, the ecstasy of chosen kinship, "your people, my people, all that hashappened / to us"

This book reads as gospel, as righteous text that carves a religion out of friendship... Blessed be Danez Smith, for allowing us that closeness... Smith holds genius in them, and we are lucky that they choose to share it with usso abundantly

Homie is how we survive – in verse... For Danez, friendship is a forest ripe with foliage and possibility... They offer us poems of seed and breath, charging us to reimagine the world as inhabitable and safe in this skin and these bodies beckoning us back to dirt

Homie is deeply moving and funny… [and] a step change from Smith’s earlier work

The president of black voices in poetry. Smith uses their new collection to explore the ideas of friendship, intimacy and comfort

I return to this collection to remind myself of what is possible on the page, the joy, the rigour, the necessity of a strut. Smith writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare - a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be

A great collection of poetry about friendship, sex and Blackness. It's rare for me to go back to poetry but I come back to this again and again... It's beautiful

A collection to read as we reflect on the challenges 2020 has presented to us all

Homie felt like a book for this year as we learned to look after one another in new ways

[Homie] filled me with pure joy. It is a book as inventive, funny, sad, warm and sharp as any I've ever read

Much of Smith's early success came through the slam poetry scene... Homie makes the case for Smith as a poet of the page

Actress by Anne Enright is a brilliant, lyrical, powerful novel... It's dazzlingly sharp and unnervingly intimate.

Anne Enright's Actress is up there as one of my favourites this year.

Enright focuses on the complexities of human connection… gradually the subtleties form into something profound and complex…witty and really rather brilliant.

Actress is yet another typically luminous story from Irish author Anne Enright… a raw, tender portrayal of a woman undone by her work, and the men who control it. Seamlessly wrought, it is quite bewitching.

Anne Enright has an unmistakable diction and a genius for arresting detail. Her novel, a daughter’s account of her once-famous actress mother’s life, is a many-sided thing… Actress is especially good in its evocation of an Ireland and a Dublin that is vanished, highly developed in civility and language, voracious for gossip, sociable, religious, hypocritical, louche, drunken and with a sensitivity to the nuances of speech.

The narrative dances through plays, boozing and parties… Enright dwells, intriguingly, on passivity, a state common in acting, womanhood and living in Ireland… a winning read.

Actress is a remarkably positive story of female creativity, courage, survival and love… a tour de force of half-concealed effects and slow-burning revelations that splutter suddenly into flame.

Brilliantly and delightfully done… [Actress] is always interesting, and…very enjoyable.

[A] literary force to be reckoned with... [Anne Enright] is one of Ireland's most significant authors - and Actress will be a must-read for many in 2020.

A delicate, knotty reflection on familial relationships… brilliant.

Another compelling effort filled with Enright’s trademark psychological insight.

Absorbing… Enright’s prose is so beautiful that even the shadows are graced with flickers of light… Actress is an elegant novel.

A warm and generous portrait of a relationship between a daughter and her famous mother… skilfully interwoven with Norah’s own story, and the twists and turns of her own life and marriage.

Gripping drama and a pitch-perfect evocation of the stages of Seventies Dublin and London’s West End.

A potent brew of fame, sexual power, hypocrisy and bad men.

A powerful novel.

Actress is a fabric of musings… The characters in Enright’s novels are absorbing because they seem recognisable in an unassuming way: they’re as lovely, boring and complex as the people outside the books.

Enright, herself a former actress, captures all the comedy and pathos that comes from living the strange, unreal life of an actor.

A raw, tender portrayal of a woman undone by her work, and the men who control it. Seamlessly wrought, it is quite bewitching.

Actress is a poignant tale of the vicissitudes of fame and its effects on the loved ones of the famous.

Compelling.

The next stage in an illustrious writing career… stuffed full of dark wit, memorable lines and striking images.

Enright is to Dublin as Didion is to California.

I've just started reading Anne Enright's Actress. I very much enjoyed her previous novel, The Green Road. This one has glorious lines even in the opening pages.

I would definitely recommend Actress by Anne Enright, it is her at her very best.

Few reviews said how absolutely hilarious [Actress] is. Enright skewers beautifully those creepy provincial aesthetes of Dublin of the sixties and seventies.

Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness. Here she conjures [a] rollicking story.

A rich, impressively imagined work about a stage and screen star who may never have existed but seems considerably more human than many real-life figures as seen through their own eyes or those of any but the finest biographers.

This story is about mothers and daughters, but also secrets in families and women in Ireland. It's an easy read, with a quintessentially Irish tone... It's brilliant.

Anne Enright's brilliant novel is a darkly glittering account of the cost to both the mother and her daughter of Katherine's complicated fame.

A gem from a former Booker winner.

Anne Enright['s]...writing is simply glorious. Comedy and tragedy in one.