Bellow at his best ... funny, vibrant, ironic, self-mocking and wise

There was something about Humboldt's Gift - the sheer ecstatic pleasure of the writing, the intensity of the imagery, the entrancing ability to combine high comedy with deeply serious intellectual ideas, the astonishing talent for describing faces, the warm affection for Chicago characters - which excited me almost beyond endurance

It has always been on the cards that Saul Bellow would write The Great American Novel. With Humboldt's Gift, I think that he has achieved this.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is whip-smart, continuously compelling, and acerbic in all the right ways.

Electrifying... [Moshfegh] is adept at crafting compelling female characters who violate the rules of femininity... Moshfegh’s protagonist is an unlikely revolutionary.

A relentlessly savage fable of privilege and pain… While we’re laughing, we feel disgust. It’s a combination that makes for diamond-hard entertainment.

Darkly hilarious... [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.

The best literary novel (and best book, full stop) that I read in 2019 was My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. It is that incredibly rare book hyped as being "hilarious" which is actually funny... It's also a devastating satire of WASP culture, psychiatrists and New York.

[My Year of Rest and Relaxation is] a laugh-out-loud page-turner... it’s also the best 9/11 novel I’ve read.

Moshfegh’s blackly funny new novel… [hits] multiple marks at once: as an art-school prank, a between-the-lines tale of displaced grief and a pitiless anatomy of gender injustice, it also offers… a dark state-of-America fable.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnerving and compelling new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation… percussively hammered out in her flawless, rhythmic prose… concludes with a startlingly, unexpectedly beautiful passage… radical, urgent, and more painfully wise than perhaps we would like to admit.

[Ottessa Moshfegh] has been hailed in America as a saviour of literary fiction... she specialises in anti-heroines who won’t jump through the usual hoops of womanhood... [My Year of Rest of Relaxation is] the kind of wickedly funny book you can tear through in an afternoon.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel is as arresting as her first… A study of alienation and dislocation, Ms Moshfegh's compelling novel is filled with warped desires and reckless pursuits, but also with wisdom and warmth.

An arresting, original read… [Moshfegh] has a singular instinct for the jangled interiority of loners and outsiders… a scoop direct from the places to which the human mind plummets in private… This is a novel of immense and yet very ordinary human sadness. That is a lot to achieve.

There is no doubt that My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a magnificent satire… As ever, Moshegh shimmers with intelligence and wit.

Viciously funny… Moshfegh’s writing is as lethally efficient as a flick-knife.

Savage, funny, frequently on the verge of teetering into lunacy… [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] is a non-negotiable in your holiday carry-on this summer.

The boldest literary statement of passive resistance since Herman Melville’s scrivener famously declared “I would prefer not to”… [a] deliciously dark and unsettling modern fairytale.

[Moshfegh is] one of America's brightest and brashest literary talents—and My Year of Rest and Relaxation is another bold assault on the status quo.

This may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author… A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.

I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yet I could not put the book down... Moshfegh’s protagonist is brutally dreary, and the brutality of her dreariness is often very funny, but the book is really... about the realness of a more subtle and very private expression of pain.

It's not often that I pick up a book and get a new favorite author. But that's pretty close to what happened... She’s the real thing.

Both refined and depraved… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a page-turner.

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation is blisteringly funny, perceptive, knowing and shows how so many of us lead disaffected, alienated lives even without becoming narcotic recluses.

You’ll emerge from this darkly hilarious novel not necessarily rested or relaxed but more finely attuned to how delicately fraught the human condition can be.

This is destined to be one of the summer’s most buzzed-about books.

Moshfegh’s ear remains as merciless as ever. Like a latter-day Flaubert, she delights in vanity and mediocrity, and in the absurdist heights both can reach whenever the occasion calls for a few sincere words.

Moshfegh’s sly new novel is… a strange, compelling tale of existential angst.

[The] premise makes me instantly want to reach for the book and hide with it for the next few hours.

[Moshfegh] delights in creating fiction…like a magician who performs her best tricks without any props.

[With] deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream.

Ottessa Moshfegh pulls off an unlikely premise, demonstrating once again the unsettling energy, daring plotting and biting observations that have earned her literary prizes and praise from the start of her career.

Moshfegh’s managed to produce a funny, acerbic and captivating novel from both a heroine we ought to hate (a rich kid bored with the life of plenty) and a plot that’s almost tautologically sedate (nap after blackout after nap after blackout)… it’s invigorating… what raises this book above the masses is Moshfegh’s wit, her invention, and her unflinching eye for the grotesque; anything could happen to our narrator and we’d keep on reading, because Moshfegh would make it sound unerringly interesting.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a merciless comedian of vanity and frailty.

Intoxicating… [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] is the boldest literary statement of passive resistance since Herman Melville’s scrivener… It speaks to Moshfegh’s storytelling skills that an account of someone sleep for a year is as gripping as My Year of Rest and Relaxation reads.

The writing is precise and hilarious, as well as disturbing and dark.

Moshfegh’s characters are often so funny in and about their unhappiness that we don’t want them to escape it, or not yet… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is written in multiple modes at once: comedy and tragedy and farce, blurring into one another, climbing on top of one another.

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel.

I love this book. It's funny, I find it intriguing and Moshfegh has a dark voice. I started reading her and thought, 'This sounds like a female Bret Easton Ellis'.

Enthralling. The voice is compelling and witty, drawing one into the experience.

The black comedy draws you in and the mysteries, twists and turns keep you there.

Whip-smart and bleakly funny.

The most inspiring novel of recent years.

Depressing, dystopian, dry and dark, but also strangely comforting and full of the joy of innocent fantasy of withdrawing from a hostile world.

Moshfegh's stunning 2018 novel has a haunting ending... [and] relentlessly vicious humour.

This razor sharp satirical novel has achieved near mythical status... [a] compelling and clever take on a female character that isn't afraid to speak her mind

Ottessa is one of our newest, most dazzling, daring and outrageous voices in literature

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