I can't remember a book that made me laugh more . . . Man at the Helm is a winner - it even trumps Love, Nina

A wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family . . . Buoyantly comic: farcical yet tender, rude with a forgiving sweetness

Read it and be charmed. Just the right mixture of childhood innocence and incredulity for the necessary deadpan delivery of Stibbe's particular brand of comedy

All hail a book that's funny!

[A] joyous read, full of wit and charm . . . I am already longing for Nina Stibbe's next book

A beguilingly comic blend of naivety and precociousness

Within a few pages I was completely caught up in the lives of Lizzie and her family . . . I couldn't have loved it more

Fantastic. Comical, moving and brilliantly evocative of British childhood

This book is very, very funny. Stibbe has a fine eye for absurdity, and her writing has an unforced charm. [And] there is real darkness here, which makes the humour shimmer all the more

Lizzie's voice is convincingly childlike but also confidently witty . . . What is most moving here - and what makes the book most similar to Love, Nina - is its celebration of the happiness possible within the family. Stibbe's feat is to remain unsentimentally barbed while subtly and triumphantly demonstrating the value of the kind of understated love found within the strangest and least obviously functional families

Fans of Love, Nina will not be disappointed. Amusing, the writing is never less than accomplished

This densely populated coming-of-age story (for both mother and children) has retained and even expanded on Stibbe's signature antic charm ... The appeal of Stibbe's novel lies less in plotting than in the way she shades a sequence of comic vignettes with seriously sad undertones. It's not too much of a stretch to conclude that Man at the Helm, with its jauntily matter-of-fact social satire, wouldn't be out of place on the same shelf as Cold Comfort Farm and I Capture the Castle

This tour-de-force follow-up to Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a celebration of the extraordinary in the everyday, and Baume’s prose elevates the ordinary and finds inspiration in the strange.

[B]eautifully drawn … Baume’s writing is lyrical and immensely readable … [S]he is, in fact, the everywoman of her generation.

There’s an effortless profundity to Baume’s writing that never once draws attention to itself but rather quietly reminds you how terribly sad the world can be.

As tender and luminous as her debut.

Baume’s writing is lyrical and immensely readable ... [her] portrait of a conflicted young woman is heart-wrenchingly real on every page.

A refreshing take on the genre, a semi-autobiographical retreat novel about finding something to live for not in nature but in art.

With this inventive and fascinating new novel Baume proves that she is the master of describing the intense poignancy of solitude within a noise-drenched world.

Baume achieves the feat of making a book about depression, alienation and other cheerful subjects deeply absorbing and, ultimately uplifting. She does this through the elegant lucidity of her prose, the sharp truth of her insights and the wry humour that arise from her character’s associative mind.

A masterclass in the power of prose that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt lost.

Baume’s writing is distinguished by remarkable precision and lucidity

A fast-paced, ambitious, hallucinatory mystery

Marvellous, original and intelligent. Kunzru writes like a master storyteller... There's simply nothing [he] couldn't manage in prose

Publisher's description. Electrifying, subversive and wildly original, White Tears is a ghost story and a love story, a story about lost innocence and historical guilt. This unmissable novel penetrates the heart of a nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge and exploitation, and holding a mirror up to the true nature of America today.

Compulsively readable, masterly - a tour de force

Riveting from the very first page, I was completely addicted... A literary thriller and a timely, unsparing excavation of the very real spectre of race in America's past and present. White Tears is proof that Kunzru is one of the finest novelists of his generation...

Hari Kunzru is an incredibly versatile writer who is alert to the inequalities in the world... Powerful and complex, White Tears is a novel about abuses of wealth and power. Brilliantly orchestrated, unforgettable and devastating

Hari Kunzru is one of our most important novelists

Kunzru's engagingly wired prose and agile plotting sweep all before them

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly