One of those rare books that leaves you feeling less lonely. An uplifting tale of community, healing and the small connections that can change a life. A gorgeous gift of a novel, hopeful and full of humanity.

A heart-stopping read and a stunning, resonant exploration of a community, a motherless boy and living an authentic life.

What a gorgeous book. Unsentimental but generous, sharp as a teacher's side-eye and bursting with soul.

How to Build a Boat is a gentle tsunami of a novel, so beautifully and tenderly crafted you don't even notice you're being swept along. It gets right to the heart of what it means to be broken and searching for community. I can't wait for readers to fall in love with Jamie's refreshingly sideways take on life.

A story of absence, love, loss, courage and resilience lit up from within, Elaine Feeney's How To Build A Boat is an emotionally resonant tour-de-force very much in keeping with the unforgettable spirit of her debut As You Were.

Utterly absorbing... so intelligent and human... sharp and subtle with beautiful poetic language. Feeney is one of those rare authors who can perform linguistic acrobatics while her characters tenderly break your heart.

A hopeful, uplifting story of people reclaiming power over their own lives, celebrating creativity and diversity in the face of those who would punish difference. A poignant and exhilarating story exquisitely told in Feeney's stunning prose.

I really loved How to Build a Boat. It's a beautiful, moving, uplifting book about the ways people differ and the ways they connect. It will make you feel better.

Sensitive and insightful about those who help us to rediscover our sense of wonder. Full of beautiful human complexity.

The portrayal of Jamie's struggle is extraordinarily poignant, and the book sails to a tender and almost heart-breaking crescendo of hope forged through honesty and imagination

A heart-rending and delightful voyage... Elaine Feeney has a poet's way with words and uncanny understanding of human frailty

Lyrical and ambitious, humorous and disturbing at points, Delphi is a relatable tale ... Delphi gets to the heart of what we might not see coming when the future isn't on our radar

Delphi [...] deftly utilises the occult world to shine an unflinching light on domestic mundanity, midlife anxiety and our changed relationship with the future ... Pollard takes care to demonstrate that amidst overwhelming, life-altering experiences, we can find comfort in small miracles and moments - a smile from a loved one, or recovery from illness. An important reminder that there is a sense of hope and contentment to be found in the present

Delphi is a triumph of sly observation, wit and tragedy... dark and dangerous, disturbed and disturbing in equal measure - I loved it.

Consoling, harrowing, hilarious. I feel like it's healed me ...Pollard's narrator is so funny and so radically honest it leaves you reeling

Delphi is a compact miracle of a book

Bold, brave and uncompromising, Pollard has found a way to write about the last couple of years which is both truthful and enjoyable to read, which I didn't think was possible. Exhilarating, exciting, rare and beautiful

Vivid as fireworks, Delphi explodes with the ambivalence, rage and dread of middle years lived within a world of pandemic and climate collapse. Both terrifying and exhilarating

Using language that charms and beguiles, Clare Pollard cleverly creates moments of the darkest déjà vu, so that I was swept up into a story which I was both unnerved and reassured to recognise

Delphi delivers an urgency unlike any I've experienced. I loved this book so much; the language, the humour, the style, which reminded me of both Patricia Lockwood and Sheila Heti. A brilliant novel born of searing eloquence and sinister wit

Adjei-Brenyah may have the buzziest book of the year . . . A ferocious attack on America's for-profit prison systems.

Beautiful and brutal, with a really furious social commentary underpinning it.

Chain-Gang All-Stars surpasses all expectations...Adjei-Brenyah's acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth.

Chain-Gang All-Stars should pique your interest if titles like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale are more your vibe.

Makes explicit how the spirit erodes as the body becomes currency. Adjei-Brenyah writes sharply about the economy of spectacle and the fickle alchemy between futility and hope.

Told with bold, muscular prose, this book is filled with surprising tenderness. As big as it is dazzling. It's just wild how good and original this book is. A revelation!

This book will change you!...A masterpiece.

Adjei-Brenyah is...[an] acclaimed master of our futuristic nightmares...a keen observer of racial and socioeconomic disparities that result in a high number of Black people incarcerated. While this is set in the future, it feels uncomfortably close to the present.

A brutal, heart-wrenching story that feels so close to reality...A tale of survival and resistance in an unfair prison system.

[A] blazing debut novel...A damning indictment of mass incarceration, systemic racism, and the grotesqueries of unfettered American capitalism, Chain-Gang All-Stars is also a breathless dystopian thriller.

In a narrative world where the real is growingly more unbelievable than the make believe, Chain-Gang All-Stars is an uncanny, singular feat for literature. I've never read satire so bruising, so brolic, so tender and, really, so pitch-perfect. It's nuts brilliant. Just read it!

As vital as it is brutal. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah illuminates darkness with the electricity of his prose. The massive weight of the subject is matched by the sheer scope of Adjei-Brenyah's imagination. A startling, important novel that will inspire and inform many conversations.

[A] ferocious debut novel...Adjei-Brenyah does not flinch. Neither does he miss his targets, because he has the stiff winds of history at his back...With Chain-Gang All-Stars he lets us think we're reading a satire, but soon reveals a mirror of our dystopian days that lie not too far away.

A complex, brutal, beautiful, panoramic takedown of the prison-industrial complex... At once original, its own fresh creation, and clearly part of a lineage of American literature that links the opening 'Battle Royal' chapter in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Native Son by Richard Wright, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Soledad Brother by George Jackson... Adjei-Brenyah's distinguished novel updates this tradition to encompass our dizzying, barbaric, performative and capitalistic digital age.

With his sharp eye for satire and reverence for humanity, Adjei-Brenyah's latest explores the exploitation, violence, and false promises of the prison industrial complex, capitalism, and the country itself.

A chillingly dystopian tale.

A clear-eyed critique of our country's prison system, along with the profit and racism inherent in them.

At once a kaleidoscopic, imaginative examination of America's unjust prison system, and a fantasy-tinged spectacle, Chain-Gang All-Stars is likely to excite and provoke in equal measure.

A searing debut with an unforgettable voice, Chain Gang All-Stars will force you to reevaluate what freedom in America really means.

It is an up-to-the-minute j'accuse that speaks to the eternal question of what it truly means to be free. And human. Imagine The Hunger Games refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.

Breathtaking and pulse-pounding... Both the political allegory and the edge-of-your-seat action work beautifully. Readers will be wowed.

[An] enthralling debut... An unmissable read

Adjei-Brenyah compels the reader to look beyond the page, blurring the lines between modern America and the hellscape he so energetically imagines

Few others this year have touched Adjei-Brenyah for ideas and ambition… perhaps the most indelible novel of 2023

A fizzy love letter to the prototypical romcom

So much of Sittenfeld's work exists in the dissection and comprehension of female desire

Flirting with the tropes of its namesake genre, this playful novel follows Sally, a writer on an "S.N.L."-like show called "Night Owls," who falls in love with one of its guest hosts. Their relationship develops via e-mail in the post-grocery-wiping, pre-vaccine days of covid-19. When Sally decides to visit her beloved in L.A., their time together in his Topanga mansion requires her to navigate incredulity, insecurity, and an offer that she feels is an "affront to my independence." The novel is preoccupied with the instinctual nature of self-sabotage, and with the fulfillment that can come from defying ingrained impulses

Insightful romcom sparkles with real wit and wisdom

Whip smart and really funny

Scores big on giving readers an insight into the machinations of a TV writers-room

Full of dazzling banter and sizzling chemistry

If you ever wanted a backstage pass to Saturday Night Live, this book is for you

Excellent

Both a brilliant portrait of the comedy world and a witty grown-up love story. Lives up to its name