A compelling work that grabs your attention from page one

Reminds me of Peter Straub at his finest – sends a shiver down the spine

Terrific dialogue and wild story make this a great read

An unfolding tale about every kind of wickedness... Somehow it manages to get tighter, nastier, and more delightful as it rolls toward its lovely and completely black-hearted final pages

Miss Kennedy . . . finds herself well to the front among novelists, men or women, of today. Its theme is the clash between two incompatible worlds, and its solution is reached through tragedy

The Stairwell is a book reckless in loving, to make the skin prickle and the eyes blur.

Important... New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in its portrait of the artist as an existentialist character making his solitary way in the world

· A great novel about creativity and money and marriage, and its greatness lies in the subtlety with which these three subjects become co-dependent on one another

Gissing…deserves to be more widely read. He is at his best describing the hardship and disappointments faced by the less well-off, striving in the face of an unforgiving Victorian Society

Gissing’s insights into both the media and the effects of poverty still seem astonishingly fresh and current… Utterly compelling

Cynical, realistic and enjoyable

I have wondered why the wit, warmth and energy of the West Midlands had no voice amongst the younger English poets. Now it has. Liz Berry is the Black Country’s shining daughter.

What makes Berry an uplifting arrival is her rampant imagination and fully formed conceits

An utterly new voice, fresh, soaring, thrilling, she is one of those rare poets that make you want to wolf the book down and come back for more… A stunning debut

It is unusual for a young poet to have such a developed sense of how questions of voice, identity, place and readership can be resolved in poetry

An amazing debut that signals great things to come in the future from this original, proud poet

Wonderful…incredible words

Utterly beautiful poems of being in love, being a woman and being free. She is destined to be a star in the cosmos of poetry!

Liz Berry has an ability to bring the Black Country dialect to life with her poems

One of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully

A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a jeu d'esprit about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist.

A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels

Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappoint

Brilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh