Everything I want from a love story: sexy, convincing, baffling, funny, sad and unforgettable

Banville's exquisitely written novel unravels the deceptions of memory with wit and pathos

Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic. A world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced

Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death

To decide to weave an intricate ensemble tale around the everyday lives, hopes and desires of those who occupy a high-rise apartment block is ambitious. To then decide that the hero of the story will be a philosophical goldfish – and that the novel’s ending will be given away inside the opening chapter – is just plain ballsy. But Canadian writer Bradley Somer pulls off the feat with ease.

Brilliant and quirky

Quirky fun...I couldn’t help falling (sorry!) for such a clever, irrepressible read

An irrepressible novel—breezy, funny, sexy, and bursting with life. Bradley Somer has enormous affection and empathy for his cast of all-too-human characters (including the goldfish named Ian).

Fishbowl boasts an abundance of mordant whimsy

Touching and well-written.

Enjoyable touches of farce and wry asides abound, underscoring moments of reckoning in eccentric, yet deeply human, dilemmas

Although Ian has only a goldfish’s seconds-long capacity for memory, readers will find themselves returning to the essential truths of Somer’s characters again and again

Take the tumble with Ian. Perhaps like me you will fall, end over end, through these pages: expectant, engaged, enthused, curious, entranced, alarmed. Bradley Somer's captivating first novel is a delight

Somer writes with game-changing empathy and curiosity. [He] tackles loneliness, life, love and death with wit and sensitivity, and the novel’s message – that “no single person lives their own life; we all live each other’s together” – is one that warrants repeating, even at a goldfish’s rate of recollection.

The quaint lesson of Mr. Somer’s bagatelle is that people should take flight from the narrow confines of their fears and find adventure in the wider world of others. That, and get their bored fish a companion or two.

a very unconventional exploration of human foibles... Fishbowl is a marvellous portrayal of the tentative - and often funny - ways human beings muddle about trying to connect with one another.

I loved the whimsy in "Fishbowl." The characters are imaginative and bright, yet still clearly fiction.

What other book can boast a goldfish as both the protagonist and eyewitness to the characters, dramas and events that unfold? Bradley Somer’s engaging UK debut novel, Fishbowl, does just that, taking the reader on a unique journey of escapism.

Seven-year-old Millie is perhaps 2015’s finest comic creation. Funny, sassy and prematurely wise … Bewitching

Hefty and memorable ...the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sing into worlds we otherwise know little or nothing about.

Terrific. Shows exactly why Johnson is rated as one of the hottest writers of his generation.

Straight White Male is a horrid little book in lots of ways, a bleary squint into the squalid world of a deeply rancid person. Its worldview is dodgy, its execution is brutalist, and it’s much funnier than it has any right to be.

John Niven’s debut, 2008’s Kill Your Friends, eviscerated the music business, and the hedonistic depths plumbed by its protagonist, the A&R man Steven Stelfox, enough to cause a mortified blush in even the brassiest reader. While maintaining the key essence of that debut – a groove of exhilarating outrageousness that never lets up – Niven’s latest is a more mature work…Niven’s plotting is deft and precise…Straight White Male is caustic and poignant, yet consistently, addictively funny…Clever and joyous, this deserves to do even better than Niven’s bestselling debut.

[S]harply written ... a seriously funny book ... the writing ... is so buzzy and fresh it’s still wet on the page.

A hugely entertaining and surprisingly moving book.

The novel is as much comic as tragic…Hilarious…The gimlet-eyed descriptions of celebrity life are impossible to read without smirking…[Niven] can provoke tears of sorrow as well as laughter. . . The complexity and inexplicability of love is a serious subject but, thanks to Niven’s talent, the manopause (sic) has never been such fun.

An incredible book about hedonism

I loved that book.

[O]ne of my favourite reads of the year … Funny, irreverent, touching and well-written, this is definitely recommended.

Draws sibling love and rivalries with as much gentle satire as poignancy.

No one delineates familial bad behaviour the way [Hadley] does.

Tessa Hadley has the natural bent of a short-story writer, given to careful description and the kind of feinted closure that pushes uncomfortably past happily ever after.

Hadley is so insightful, such a lovely writer, that she pulls you right into the tangle of wires that connect and trip up the stressed siblings.

Her best so far

Hadley is expert at conveying emotion... The way she draws each character is so good the book feels like a huge achievement. Her best so far.

Hadley, who won the Hawthornden prize this month for The Past, is literary fiction’s best kept secret. Don’t let her fellow novelists keep her for themselves.

[The Past is] magnificently done: half celebration, half elegy.

There are hints of Larkin in her tender descriptions of landscape and imaginative responses to the ineffable… All her books are wonderful.

This is a hugely enjoyable and keenly intelligent novel, brimming with the vitality of unruly desire.