One uprooted Palestinian – an elite lawyer – finds his world of privilege turned upside down while a marginal drifter seeks to "pass" as Jewish. Strategies of assimilation and impersonation come under scrutiny in a cleverly interwoven, deeply perceptive intrigue

Sayed Kashua is a brilliant, funny, humane writer who effortlessly overturns any and all preconceptions about the Middle East. God, I love him.

A master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society

The novel is written with a keen eye for detail, for character, place, and mood… The stories, characters and situations of this novel are fascinating in themselves and it would, I think, be possible to enjoy the book without knowledge of, or reference to, the politics and society of Israel. Yet many in the West will value it chiefly for what it reveals about life in Israel; they may discover that the situation there is more complicated, and certainly far less clear-cut than they had supposed

Intriguing

Eshkol Nevo, grandson of Levi Eshkol, was hailed as a promising new writer with the publication of his short-story collection, B&B in Givatayim. Three years on, the critics are patting themselves on the back and saying, "I told you so." Thirty-three year-old Nevo's first full-length novel is a deeply human book, suffused with desire and melacholy.

The alternating perspectives in this novel provide a key to understanding the discrepancies in Israel, between European and Oriental culture, religious and secular perspectives, Jews and Arabs. At the same time, Nevo tells us with great sensitivity about feelings and relationships between man and woman, parents and children, between entire peoples.

Playful and painful account, delicately translated...puts the personal before the political every time.

This is a tale of modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and ironies roped together, making it a must-read. It’s little wonder that the author has won both China's equivalences of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Lenin's Kisses wickedly satirizes a sycophantic society where money and power are indiscriminately worshiped ... As the traveling circus gains fans across the country, it becomes clear that the officials behind the scenes, not the performers, are the true freaks

Sprawling, sometimes goofy, always seditious novel of modern life in the remotest corner of China . . . Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, and you’re in the approximate territory of Lianke’s latest exercise in épatering the powers that be . . . A satirical masterpiece

The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making the reader laugh out loud ... a truly miraculous novel

Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where the one eyed-man is king . . . Brutal. And wickedly funny

Lenin's Kisses shines with both the lyrical flourishes of magical realism and the keenly sharpened knives of great satire. The reader joins the inhabitants of the village of Liven as they confront the great upheavals of 20th Century Chinese history armed with both whimsy and their obsessive determination to prevail. This tale is at once breathtaking and seriously funny. Anyone who wishes to understand the psychic world-view of the modern People's Republic of China must read this fine novel.

With its distinctive language, structure and narrative approach, Lenin's Kisses presents a distictive version of 'rural china' and 'revolutionary China', even while establishing a new literary 'native China'

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide

A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating

Provocative, funny and original

A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness

An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds

A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture

[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being

Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of

Playful, funny... absolutely true

Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations

Amusing and original