Wonderful, brilliant, panoramic, illuminating. A joy to read

Gripping, vivid, beautifully realized

Powerful and moving. A brilliant and multifaceted saga of Scottish life in the second half of the twentieth century

Toweringly ambitious, virtually flawlessly realized, a masterpiece and, without a doubt, my book of the year

Big, ambitious, intricately organised . . . it's some achievement

Dizzying . . . subtle and profound . . . And The Land Lay Still reads like an alternative history of Scotland told by its everyday people instead of its movers and shakers . . . eminently readable

Both epic and domestic, it delivers a wonderful lifelikeness

A hugely ambitious and compassionate novel . . . a jam-packed, dizzying piece of fiction . . . already it's being spoken of as the most important novel about Scotland since Lanark