What startled its contemporaries about this strange novel was the sense of something new, one of those as yet unnamed and perhaps unnameable psychic discoveries for which the novelists of the period - from Dostoevsky to James – desperately searched... This turns out to have been the novel's project... to modify our sense of what luck or happiness means.

A full-blooded storyteller, a critic of life and society of the highest European order... Reasserts the grand style of narrative in a world short of breath.

Blew me away with its power, anger and wit.

A big and rambunctious novel that casts a cold satirical eye on themes such as language, culture, identity, sectarianism, and the terrifying proximity of the past

Shimmering with wit, simmering with an incandescent rage, shot through with a seam of wild magic, The Fire Starters is a powerful, disturbing portrait of East Belfast and its people and its hope for the future. I won’t be the only reader to proclaim that, in the best way possible, Jan Carson is on fire.

Captivating, intelligent and courageous

Carson's playfulness delights again and again, even as she explores her city's darkest corners. Sound the siren: this novel truly burns bright

Jan Carson seems to have invented a new Belfast in this gripping, surprising, exhilarating novel.

With her idiosyncratic blend of warm intelligence, dark humour, and magic realism, Jan Carson brings us a singular portrait of a city and its people struggling with questions of guilt, responsibility, and the limits of love.

A perfect mix of dark humour, magic and social commentary.

A brilliant, wry novel, fizzing with energy

With a caustic wit and lyrical prose style, The Fire Starters is a rumination on fatherhood, identity, culture and place ... it marks out Carson as one of the most exciting and original Northern Irish writers of her generation

Irresistible, vivid and gripping

Both a fiercely gripping thriller and a beautifully twisted fable, The Fire Starters is an electrifying blast of Belfast Gothic: a luminous, furious vision of a city at war with itself.

Wow. Hypnotic, alluring, perfectly vivid.

Breathtaking ... The best book I read this year

Characteristically inventive, Carson throws into fresh relief the complexities of familial relationships

A playful study of fatherhood and the still-flickering flames of the conflict in Northern Ireland . . . hugely and pleasingly reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s fabulist take on the partition of India, Midnight’s Children.

Unusual, mystical and so sublimely written, I read it in a single sitting

One of 2019's top reads

The writing here is incredible - a breath-taking novel

Spectacular... Dark, beautiful, at once grittily real and wildly magical, insanely alluring - a siren-song of a novel.

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