‘He’s a funny writer, John Niven. Not funny peculiar: funny ha ha. Properly funny, in a scabrous and scatological sort of way, and in his latest book he doesn’t disappoint. It’s a big, comic tableau, painted in bright, broad shades with plenty of splatter marks … Niven makes sentences beautifully – which, in whatever genre you are writing, is what matters most – and this novel clips along as enjoyably as all his others … There are two John Nivens in this novel. One provides the broad farce … But the other supplies something that’s closer to Nick Hornby territory … Niven is particularly good on how easy it is to resent our friends, how charity can be covertly aggressive, and how psychological power dynamics don’t really shift from our teenage years … There’s a poignancy here ... Always worth reading. He’s a writer – or two – who still has a lot more in the tank.’

Underneath the scabrous wit, the raucous brio, the bracing rudeness, Niven is genuinely, brilliantly warm and funny and wise about men and women and the things they do to one another and themselves. This is his best novel yet.

No Good Deed is about the fall that waits one floor down for every male member of the chattering classes. Charles Dickens with a good strong dollop of Martin Amis and Quentin Tarantino – vintage Niven. Loved it.

Niven is a master at probing dark, uncomfortable areas of the male psyche that most novelists – indeed, most men – would rather not have to deal with.

Snort-in-public comic excellence … One darkly humorous episode after another … The fact that I had such a visceral reaction to this book is testament to Niven’s great skill as a writer. He is a master of probing the dark, uncomfortable areas of the male psyche that most novelists – and indeed, most men – would rather not have to deal with … No Good Deed always feels rooted in the real world, even in its most outrageously improbable moments.

[A] riotous black comedy … A deliciously readable morality tale about social climbing, this bursts with off-colour gags and satire of middle-class lifestyles.

John Niven is surely the most rollickingly outrageous novelist of his generation …emotionally satisfying, entertaining, dazzlingly written.

Brimming with rumbustious, bawdy energy.

A very entertaining read.

We laughed out loud.

Told with tender delicacy, A Place for Us is a moving and joyful portrait of a modern family, about growing up between two cultures, reconciling with the past, and identity as a lived experience

Moving, thought-provoking and ultimately positive, this is a story about family, tradition and culture in a modern world

A brilliant, highly readable contemporary tale of identity and belonging

Mirza is a gifted storyteller and this moving novel was one of the highlights of my reading year

This is a richly detailed, immersive saga that hooks you from the jump and keeps you absorbed even as you spend decades with its character

The best book I’ve read this year

In this stunning, generous novel, Mirza looks at the crucial events in an Indian-American Muslim family from many perspectives

Mirza's writing is like poetry as she examines just how far the bonds of family can bend

The great achievement of this novel – as of Vikram Seth’s witty and bounteous classic, A Suitable Boy – is that it traces family troubles that could happen to anybody... touching and unsettling... If this is the standard of Sarah Jessica Parker's list, we can look forward to a feast from Hogarth

Fatima Mirza is brilliant and this novel will break your heart and make it new again

Beautiful, intimate, tender. So vividly told the characters live and breathe

A radiant debut novel about the cultural forces that bind and divide members of one close-knit Muslim-American family

A Place for Us is a triumph and an inspiration. I wish everyone would read this novel. A chronicle of the shattered expectations and irreconcilable desires within an American-Muslim family, A Place for Us hums with a deep faith in an unknown future, reminding its readers that when we are lost, love gives us a map home

‘Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty. It is so deeply imagined, so intimately attentive to and solicitous of the lives it follows, so artful in describing the inseparable human experiences of pride and resentment, humility and loyalty -- and, most of all, love – that it feels not as if we are reading a novel about this Indian Muslim family struggling with tradition and a new culture, but as if we become actual members of the family. It is that immersive, that brilliant, that true’

[I]t’s groundbreaking to read… That we become so invested in a testament to Mirza’s talent

Throughout the course of the novel a complex dynamic of emotion emerges, and the novel unspools with striking maturity

With unwavering compassion, this [is a] beautiful heartbreaker

Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a radiant debut. It accretes its power, beauty, and insight through its tender witnessing of private and family life. With her deeply compassionate view, Mirza dignifies terrain often desecrated by contemporary culture: maternity, faith, the bonds of community, the yearning for goodness, and our duty to others. She shows us the destructiveness of our doubt in those we love, and the mercy of forgiveness. Most wondrously, with this felt and moving novel, Mirza creates a place in which rebellion and reverence seem to embrace

A Place for Us is a radiantly envisioned, beautifully achieved epic about nearly everything that matters: love, family, faith, freedom, betrayal, contrition, absolution. Fatima Farheen Mirza is a magnificent new voice

The title of the book echoes a song from West Side Story, itself a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. Here the warring forces are not two families but one, split by the tension between reverence and rebellion. The author's passion for her subject shines like the moon in the night sky, a recurrent image in this ardent and powerful novel

Extraordinary in its depth... slow-brewing, affecting

Ondaatje brings to life this work…with meticulous detail

Ondaatje is a skillfully deliberate writer

Warlight not only shines a light into the shadowy wars…but also the uncertain age of adolescene

This seam of subterfuge and the truth being gradually released from the shadows make Warlight gripping reading… Ondaatje adorns the walls with his characters like a master gallerist

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war. It’s eerily prescient.

Hypnotic.

An exquisite, elegiac account of a life forged in the shadow of other people's secrets, told in language as feathery and delicate as a moth.

I look above all else in fiction for sureness of touch with sentences – and that was abundantly in evidence…in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight… [Warlight has] the unmistakable stamp of [the author] knowing exactly what [he’s] doing.

Ostensibly realistic, it is phantasmagoric… Everything he says bristles with improbable life. Reading it is like watching a movie in which, however much activity there is, the atmosphere dominates the plot

A meditative and dreamily lyrical espionage thriller

Ondaatje brings Warlight’s seemingly disparate fragments together with such skill that the ending feels not just satisfying but inevitable. The most lovely conjuring trick, it leaves you in awe of the magician. I emerged blinking into the glare of the 21st century, bereft in a way a novel hasn’t left me bereft for a longtime

Ondaatje’s onion of a novel, his first since 2011’s The Cat’s Table, combines rich intrigue with a meditation on how we rewrite our memories by examining them… a stunning return.

Magnificent.

Nothing in the world of this novel is ever redundant; nothing is accidental. Whenever you come across a striking detail…you can be sure it will crop up again, be charged with more significance, be joined with the rest of the story in a long chain of meaning.

Mesmerising.

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years is also one of his best – a quiet but profoundly powerful book… A superior, espionage novel about the unstable, shape-shifting nature of personal history.

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

[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

In Warlight we have a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing – and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven’t read a better novel this year

[Ondaatje’s] prose has a haunting musicality, which George Blagden brings out to the full.

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