Paul Howard is one of the funniest writers in the land

Hilarious

Ross is a national institution, and his adventures continue to chart the foibles and fortunes of modern-day Dublin with wicked humour and sharp observation

Bold, imaginative…intensely realistic, swarming with minute physical and social detail… Mort writes brilliantly about the physical presence of the city, and she deals just as well with the tight focus of the climb... [Black Car Burning] is frequently exhilarating in its accurate sympathy, with some inch-perfect dialogue and astute observation throughout… Poet writes gripping novel: now there’s something you don’t hear every day

An impressive, Sheffield-set tale… the disparate voices are held together by short passages in which the landscape itself is given voice. These act as welcome poetic rocks in the stream of the narrative… [and] are startling reminders of Mort’s considerable poetic skill

A book that deals empathetically and movingly with [Sheffield's] ongoing legacy

Helen Mort is unmistakably one of the most brilliant poets of her generation; Black Car Burning shows her to be a remarkable novelist, too. Here the landscape itself is given presence – a deep-time gritstone witness to the hearts and hates of humans. Violence, trauma, trust and hope twine together in this novel of many voices, ancient and modern. As you're drawn on through – up into – the book, you begin to realize that beneath the bright surface is a profound patterning, slowly disclosing itself to the reader

This agile, softly-spoken novel isn’t so much about rock climbing as about being alive. Helen Mort tracks her characters from the gritty pleasures of the Sheffield crags to the traumas of Hillsborough. Meanwhile, the very rocks and rivers speak, defining a landscape of use, mystery and change, hope. Brilliant

Black Car Burning does what surprisingly few books even attempt: it gives a voice to the lyric landscapes of South Yorkshire, it looks beyond binary clichés to consider the real lives of real people in streets and suburbs that are often forgotten; Mort handles trauma, lust and loss so tenderly and deftly, it is hard to believe that this is a first novel

This book is a symphony of voices: of lovers and the land they grasp in strong but scar-lined hands. Black Car Burning channels the soul of a city and its surrounds. Helen Mort shifts with deftness and empathy from the sensuous to the dark, communing with slandered neighbourhoods, the shadow of a disaster, and a generation's complex ascents through love. A hymn to a special city and an unforgettable book

A deeply internalised tale about love and yearning, trauma and loss, and springs from a place where the whispered thoughts of both people and places intersect in unsettling fashion

Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted fourteenth novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination... You can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse.

[Quichotte] is Don Quixote for our time, a smart satire of every aspect of the contemporary culture. Witty, profound, tender, this love story shows a fiction master at his brilliant best.

Quichotte overwhelms you from the first page with a lightning storm of ideas and a monsoon of exuberant prose… Quichotte has all the verbal pyrotechnics and outlandish invention that will be familiar to readers of Rushdie’s fourteen previous novels, but at the heart it is a serious and affecting tale about the irresistible pull of history… those who are prepared to sit back and enjoy the ride will encounter scenery like none they have ever seen.

Nothing but extraordinary... This incisively outlandish but lyrical meditation on intolerance, TV addiction, and the opioid crisis operates on multiple planes, with razor-sharp topicality and humor, delivering a reflective examination of the plight of marginalized personhood with veritable aplomb. Highly recommended.

Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope... Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie.

Rushdie’s rambunctious latest... [is an] uproarious comedy… a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times.

A genre-hopping, cross-country picaresque which rips along with a great deal of wit, verve and empathy.

Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials.

Hilarious by all accounts.

This sardonic portrait of America combines exuberant humour with sober reflections on the toxic excesses of 21st-century media.

Rushdie’s most personal novel for years… a truly imaginative response to his own experience of exile and dislocation.

Quichotte is funny… beautiful, lucid prose.

About a dozen pages into Quichotte, Salman Rushdie’s 14th novel, we read of an invention so devious, so outrageous, that it dispels any thought that the author’s imaginative powers might be waning… It’s a masterstroke in an uneven but diverting and occasionally brilliant novel… [and] a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.

Now in his eighth decade, it is clear he [Rushdie] still possesses the linguistic energy, resourcefulness and sheer amplitude of a writer half his age – buoyant and life-enhancing qualities shared by his great Spanish predecessor [Cervantes]

Rushdie’s novel is many things beyond just a Don Quixote retelling. It’s a satire on our contemporary fake-news, post-truth, Trumpian cultural moment, where the concept of reality itself is coming apart. It’s a sci-fi novel, a spy novel, a road trip novel, a work of magical realism. It’s a climate change parable, and an immigrant story in an era of anti-immigration feeling. It’s a love story that turns into a family drama... Characters, narratives and worlds collide and come apart in spectacular fashion, while Rushdie maintains an exhilarating control over it all.

A meditation on life, death and the stories told about both.

The fiction about fiction that takes the breath away… Quichotte expertly does it again.

Funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero… [Quichotte is] compelling.

Rushdie is a master storyteller who weaves his fictions and characters into such agreeable tapestries.

The novel's dazzling virtuosity and cascade of cultural references culminate in a final moving moment of hope