If you liked Star Trek Into Darkness, you’ll like Dave Bara’s IMPULSE.

Totally convincing space navy . . . check! Perfectly realized characters complete with depth and heroism . . . check! Plus a fascinating story with an Ahab of a captain determined to complete his mission, and a fledgling lieutenant who comes into his own in the midst of interstellar conflict. Oh yeah: exploding spaceships . . . double check!

IMPULSE is fun, fast, and proper science fiction. Where the stakes are big, and things matter because the characters matter. I enjoyed the hell out of this. Impulse should be an impulse buy.

This first in the series promises some epic dust-ups

Impulse shows what J. J. Abrams could have done with Into Darkness if he was less obsessed with flashy effects and more interested in substantial storytelling

In short, Impulse is a winner for me.

A highly accomplished novel

Fresh and vivid...extremely enjoyable

Sharp, caustic and brilliantly observed

Sittenfeld's humour and sharp observation deliver a coming-of-age novel you can relate to

Sittenfeld is a master of the phenomenon-novel . . . Set in a boarding school, [Prep] was satirical but also affectionate, and told a genuine coming-of-age story that gave the much-derided figure of the preppy American teenager a new dignity.

‘Getting inside a living person’s head sounds like a colossally bad idea, but Sittenfeld makes it convincing here, just as she did with a character based on First Lady Laura Bush in her 2008 novel, AMERICAN WIFE’

Deviously clever . . . Sittenfeld’s Hillary is both a player in the Game of Thrones and a romance novel heroine. She’s a brilliant badass who has found her voice and knows how to use it. She’s whoever she wants to be

As Hillary finds her groove, so the momentum and entertainment builds, as does your admiration for how ingeniously and plausibly Sittenfeld has re-written the script

A counterfactual novel ... throbs with energy

A fascinating glimpse into an alternative future

Pacy... plenty of sex and gossip - and a cameo from a certain yellow-haired, orange-faced president-to-be... ripe for TV adaptation

A brilliantly smart re-imagining

Sittenfeld's writing is so fine, her characters so vivid, her empathy so profound that she manages to absorb the reader on a level that transcends partisanship. In 2020, that was a remarkable achievement and an enormous gift to her readers

It ends up being a love letter to a type: the female intellectual, who is given none of the licence of her less talented male peers. At the end, i found myself saying Oh My God

A triumphant feminist reinvention. Sittenfeld is the bard of presidential female adjacents

RODHAM is wide- ranging political anthropology, concerned not so much with what makes Hillary tick as it is with the culture around her and how she might have shaped events, and been shaped by them, if the pieces of reality's jigsaw were rearranged just so. It's stippled with clever mischief

A smartly structured character study and a stay- up- all- night plot . . . A captivating and durable story containing rooms within rooms. RODHAM turns into a high- speed bildungsroman about a woman of formidable intellect and self- insight.

It's the genius of Sittenfeld's prose that we come to understand this ambivalence,as well as the deep conflicts in this complicated character. In the longing and loneliness, the anger as well as ambition, this Hillary makes RODHAM a compelling portrait of a future that might have been.

Tantalizing . . . part thought experiment, part wish- fulfillment fantasy . . . delectably discussable, a book tailor- made for book clubs.

Wildly compelling . . . What RODHAM is interested in is examining what feminine ambition looks like when it is untethered from a man. . . . Sittenfeld is free to invent, and the reality she builds is deliciously dishy.

Thought-provoking and compelling

A moving feat of feminist and novelistic imagination

From this memorable novel's eerie first paragraph to its enigmatic ending, Laura van den Berg has invented something beautiful indeed

This is one of my favorite novels of 2015, and we’re not even IN 2015 yet . . .The language is beautiful, spare, and carefully crafted, and the characters are fully realized and unforgettable. There is tension and redemption and insight and even humor in these pages, and they make for a really incredible read

Surreal adventures blend with a reflective and sad sensibility in van den Berg’s lyrical debut novel

Both novels offer precision of language and metaphor and scene even as what is being constructed feels messy, chaotic, sad, hopeless... Both orphaned and alone in the world, both so completely real, both telling a story that feels important and exciting to read. I feel lucky to have stumbled upon these books this year, and challenged by them to be better

This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. . . Van den Berg's writing is curiously beautiful

a strange beauty in this apocalyptic tale