The love child of John Green and Rainbow Rowell

I love you, Simon. I love you! And I love this fresh, funny, live-out-loud book.

This is a novel that will no doubt be catching the eyes of judges of major prizes in 2017.

Ashland and Vine is a great book… It proceeds with such loping grandeur and is so tight-lipped about its themes that it takes a while for the realization to dawn that it is nothing short of an American epic. That, however, is what Burnside has written: a drifty, dreamy, dramatic epic.

Ashland & Vine proposes solace and joy in intergenerational friendship, and an optimism in what can be accomplished through talking and listening.

Few writers manage distinction in even one form. John Burnside has achieved it in two… [A]s Burnside publishes a novel and a poetry collection on the same day, the doubled nature of his practice is impossible to ignore – and it is to be celebrated… Like his verse, his fiction captures the untidiness of life and provides no neat conclusions; neither points of arrival, nor nicely illustrated morals. Yet, instead of being artless, it creates satisfying, haunting wholes. A Burnside narrative stays in the mind like a half-broken dream; it’s often hard to pin down just why it is so compelling… The book may be a serious examination of social history but its cultural observations are sharp to the point of satire… If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both.

Burnside offers a fictional tale—a story built around a medley of American history, human fallibility and the possibility of hope.

Burnside’s new novel Ashland & Vine is a story about telling old stories again, and never quite settling the truth of a childhood long past… This is a delicate, beautiful novel, filled with tender details and sharply evoked, lyrical moments.

With the very first line, this novel sets up its emotional world with remarkable efficiency. “The day I met Jean Culver was also the day I stopped drinking”… We can sense that the next 300 or so pages are going to bring us revelations, connections and transformation… Although the obvious comparison is with Scheherazade, Burnside’s narrative is more complex than the tale-within-a-tale structure. There is a linear quality to the storytelling, but it is one in which the lines switch, double back and tie themselves in knots, or are cast aside only to be picked up again later.

John is a masterful storyteller, and this is a book all about stories. How they connect us; how they save us. I know I’m in safe hands whenever I pick up a book by him.

There are moments of shocking brutality, but they cannot overwhelm the novel’s curious tenderness. It is far and away Burnside’s most optimistic and gentle book.

Carries a healing and redemptive charge.

Immediately canonical

Part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable, Exit West is a thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant

Exit West packs such an emotional wallop you will be thinking about it for days afterwards. For Hamid is not only telling a story, he is asking what sort of a world we want to live in.

It's a terrific, beautifully constructed, important novel of our time. This is what we expect fiction to do: to examine our age but also to cast an eye on the past and - very brilliantly in this case - on the future too. I love it.

Exit West is a masterpiece. It stretches the boundaries of the real just enough to make a point about the state of immigrants and refugees in the contemporary world. But it's very much grounded in reality. It's a beautiful book.

Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation

A man born to write

The voice of a changing continent. A writer at the top of his game

A beautiful, tragic and poignant novel.

In this year’s hottest new releases.

Tender, wise and beautifully written, this is sad and deeply moving stuff from Barnes. Highly recommended.

Affecting.

A brave and expansive work, compellingly told.

A thoroughly rewarding book – a compassionate, touching and funny account… A profound book, it compels one to think about one’s own life.

A brilliant, rueful look at love.

Moving, funny, with ingenious emotional intelligence, it’s one to read and read again.

Barnes’s novel chronicles their romance with an austere tenderness

[Barnes’s] facility for writing artfully conceived and executed novels about unfulfilled, disappointed lives has risen to almost unassailable heights.

Julian Barnes writes shockingly well about emotion… The Only Story is devastating and wonderful.

A solemn-ish meditation on the fallibility of memory… A love story – bitter and sweet in parts – unfurls.

Exquisitely written, flawlessly imagined, The Mermaid & Mrs Hancock's siren song - of courtesans and merchants, shipwrecks and wonders, love and grief, ambition and passion - will echo like the ocean in a seashell long after the last page is turned.

[A] gripping debut… independence, love, class, death and gender stereotypes — are skilfully explored here through a late 18th-century lens

Beautifully written, sinuous, enchanting, brilliantly researched, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock goes deep into the eighteenth century - its grand front rooms, the secret places, the streets and the ocean that changed everything about Britain and it lays bare the hearts of a cast of unforgettable characters

This story really is spellbinding, an unforgettable jewel of a novel, filled to the brim with intelligence, heart and wit.

Beautifully written… By turns bawdy, witty and moving this is a glorious romp through Georgian London, in “the age of unlikely ascents”. With a truly gorgeous package á la The Essex Serpent, it deserves to be huge

Delightful… A gloriously immersive read, bringing Georgian London vividly to life… The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock impresses with Gowar’s attention to vivid and sensual detail

Its energy, characterisation and great sense of period completely seduced me.

An utterly absorbing read.

A gorgeously immersive novel.

Stunning.

In 2018 [mermaids] are back in vogue.

A terrific debut

The Mermaid And Mrs Hancock is the rare book that actually lives up to its hype and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t this year’s The Essex Serpent. Lush, vivid descriptions of 1780s Soho, proto-feminism, sparkly dialogue and a pleasingly irreverent style, it’s historical fiction even for people who don’t like historical fiction.

A tale of love, family and social status movingly told.

An absorbing tale of curiosity and obsession… Gowar’s prose is marvellous… There’s a beautiful balance of rhythm and intrigue, and an eye for what brings a book alive.

The most anticipated novel of the year.

An accomplished, captivating debut novel.

- The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock is a roistering, swaggering, bawdy novel… [a] confident and accomplished debut

Lush, vivid descriptions of 1780s Soho, proto-feminism, sparkly dialogue and a pleasingly irreverent style.

Prose that’s as effervescent as it is intelligent.

Gowar’s prose shimmers.

Rich and humorous, it’s a heady period whirl with a magic realist twist.

A highly impressing debut… An absorbing tale of sex, money, ambition and the lure of the new.

Gowar’s wonderful novel expertly captures that sense of a more fluid society… An engrossing and well-paced novel, shot through with melancholy, yet filled with wonder and desire. The sort of book you lose yourself in for days.

Imogen Hermes Gowar’s bawdy, picturesque romp through the heady miasma of Georgian London is easily one of the most wonderfully immersive, richly drawn books I’ve read in years… This piece of historical fiction is really something special… Some truly exquisite writing.

All-consuming and spellbinding.

Gowar's writing is energetic, and she has wonderful attention both to physical and emotional detail and to the circumstances that constrain lives

This glittering debut novel examines every rung of 18th-century London’s social ladder with keen wit and in delicious detail

A Dazzling account of dreams and desire in Georgian London