A funny, moving and uplifting novel

A funny and warm tale of friendship

I loved spending time immersed in Catrin, Judith and Lana's lives . . . A contender for my Books of the Year list

A wonderfully warm, funny, totally engrossing and unputdownable novel about friendship. A gorgeous treat.

I loved this brilliantly gripping depiction of the complexities of female friendship over the years. Love, betrayal, comedy and loss - Us Three has it all.

Warm, poignant

Warm-hearted

A warm and witty tale of friendship.

A heart-warming, entertaining and, at times, deeply moving story.

Moving and funny . . . Jones' unique voice is evident from the first sentence, with her infamous colloquial dialect and warm characters.

We couldn't turn the pages fast enough on this brilliant book.

Ruth Jones tells her well-crafted characters' experiences, both hilarious and heartbreaking, with compassion and sensitivity, making for a warm and witty story of enduring friendship.

A bruised, breathtaking love letter never meant to be sent. A marvel.

Vuong is a mightily gifted observer… Some lines have the almost hallucinatory exactness of his best poems… moving and rarely less than excellent… [On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is] unleashed in every regard.

This is one of the best novels I've ever read. Ocean Vuong is a master. This book is a masterpiece.

Ocean Vuong runs up against the limits of language—this book is addressed to a mother who cannot read it—and expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres. This is a courageous, embodied inquiry into the tangle of colonial and personal histories. It is also a gorgeous argument for astonishment over irony—for the transformative possibilities of love.

Ocean Vuong's novel is a profound consideration of identity, as well as a work of sensuous, poetic detail... we are made aware of his sense of invisibility as a Vietnamese-American while becoming totally immersed in his world. This tension between voice and silence is what lends the novel its gentle, dignified attack.

This book – gorgeous is right there in the title – finds incredible, aching beauty in the deep observation of love in many forms. Ocean Vuong’s debut novel contains all the power of his poetry, and I finished the book knowing that we are seeing only the very beginning of his truly magnificent talent.

A candid meditation on masculinity, art, and the inescapable pull of opioids... Vuong peels apart phrases and reconfigures them into new, surprising ideas.

An epistolary masterpiece... Fearless, revelatory, extraordinary.

Disarmingly frank, raw in subject matter but polished in style and language, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous reveals the strengths and limitations of human connection and the importance of speaking your truth.

[Vuong's] first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense - not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence... The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel's earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival. A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.

Casting a truly literary spell, Vuong's tale of language and origin, beauty and the power of story, is an enrapturing first novel.

Sometimes a writer comes along and stops your breath. I'm reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and there is so little air moving through my body as I read. When writing is this good, who needs air?

A poignant exploration of a family history, a celebration of maternal love and an unflinching examination of race and class. Vuong's novel is one of the most anticipated of the year.

[A] marvel of a book…[with] exquisite language.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is one of the most anticipated novels of the year… a piece of autobiographical fiction that avoids all the traps of that genre… The book has a poetic density that is at once elliptical and unflinching in its gaze, a testimony to the endlessly complicated dynamics of damage.

As an evocation of the tragic underside of American life, there’s no denying its [On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous] poetic power.

Ocean Vuong is a magician with words, when he writes, it’s as if language itself is dancing. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous… [is] a brutally honest exploration of race, class and masculinity. This debut novel is a luminous, mesmerising gift… Extraordinary.

This moving, powerful debut from prizewinning poet Ocean Vuong… [is] a graceful exploration of race, class, and masculinity.

Vuong solidifies the epistolary as an insurrectionary American form, offering it as a means of the States’ oppressed to voice their discontents with unrelenting eloquence… Vuong writes from a site of pain and compassion, for himself, for his mother, and for everyone else.

A moving, glittering letter from a son to a mother… direct, touching, stunningly wrought, [On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is] staggeringly good.

A brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity, as well as a discovery of how immersed we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness.

Unforgettable… Asking questions central to the American moment, immersed as it is in addiction, violence and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

Vuong’s gambit is to make the reader reckon not only with difficult subjects, but also pay generous, open attention to the world… This consummately American novel both documents the nation’s wounded psyche while giving its protagonist a path to healing.

Vuong…[is] a keen anthropologist of the contemporary American experience.

A beautiful novel full of raw feelings.

[A] phosphorescent debut novel… Vuong layers past and present brilliantly in a shifting series of brief episodes and striking mood-musings from within the mind of his protagonist… the hyperreality of Little Dog’s self-awareness is always a delight.

Staggering, sensual and poetic

[A] stunning debut… Ocean Vuong crafts lyrical, masterful prose in this emotionally-powerful piece of story telling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is sure to stay with readers long after they have put the novel down.

A brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.

A tender exploration of violence, migration and language.

This romantic, lusciously written debut lingers over kisses.

A magical synthesis of memoir, fiction and poetry.

So very full of beauty and power. Also, grace.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is a stunning, relentless work of pure passion and I was captivated from the go.

A story that is deeply relatable, understandable and can find common currency with us all. He uses his differences to connect us, to show the links that bind us, to explore violence, masculinity, poverty and yearning… you’ll quickly get carried away by his undercurrents into spaces and places you’d perhaps never thought of exploring or even realised existed.

Vuong’s gift lies in his ability to write with beautiful specificity while digging into the wounds of immigration, culture, queerness and memory. I’ve read many very good books in 2019 but none have obliterated me like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Ocean Vuong is a magician with words. When he writes, it's as if language itself is dancing. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is… a brutally honest exploration of race, class and masculinity. This debut novel is a luminous, mesmerising gift.

Astounding.

Vuong jettisons the prose for poetic verse, with Roland Barthes, Duchamp’s Fountain and queer love all collapsing into splintering lines of verse. Vuong’s sentences are so beautiful, sometimes I would say them over and over again in my head, hoping I might be able to trap them in there.

[Vuong is] brilliant and so flexible with language and has such an understanding of what an emotion incarnate is, he is able to not condense it but to heighten it across languages, across countries, across codes as characters speak to one another. He's peerless.

[A] triumphant debut novel... On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous felt like a true masterpiece being crafted before my eyes, and I was devastated to see the novel draw to a close. I truly can't recommend this book highly enough - I don't remember the last time I was so floored after reading something that I had to take the rest of the day off speaking to family... a passionate, eye-opening journey, and is most certainly one to be added to your lockdown reading list.

Beautifully written... Unlike anything I have read before

An engrossing coming-of-age story.

[Vuong] is an author of incredible and magical talent, with many of his paragraphs reading like the most beautiful poetry... An absolute must-read

Raw, lyrical and at times hearth-wrenching, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a book of real beauty

For a long time after I read this, I could still feel the impact of his story. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is an experience that you need to have.

I read the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong while on tour and the language often stopped me in my tracks... powerful.

Inventive... [On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous] just stops you as a reader to marvel at the beautifully constructed narrative

The Testaments cements Aunt Lydia as one of the most fascinatingly monstrous anti-heroes in fiction

‘Reminds us of the vital connection between words and power and how important it is to validate women’s words in particular

But the biggest name, with the year’s biggest book, is Margaret Atwood: her Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments

The biggest publishing event of the year

For my money, the single most exciting publishing event of the year

One of the most eagerly awaited books of the year

One of the year’s big novels will undoubtedly be Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments

It will be one of the literary events of the year

We'll be poring over The Handmaid's Tale for the 100th time in readiness

The hoopla around the launch of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is more reminiscent of the unveiling of an iPhone or something Pokemon related than that of a mere book

Tuesday was not merely Tuesday but Testaments Day, and the Capital Testaments Town

Last week's release of Atwood's sequel, The Testaments, made the last Harry Potter launch look like a wet November afternoon...a truly dazzling literary feat that -- blessed be the fruit -- entirely lives up to the hope and the hype... Atwood's particular genius is pushing and pushing at sexist tropes until they reach their grotesque but ultimately logical conclusion

Taylor Swift would kill for this kind of drama... Now, to read it

Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating

Terrifying and exhilarating

Atwood’s musings on power and the patterns of history [is] as incisive as ever

Undeniably page-turning stuff

A publishing sensation

The perfect escapist pleasure

Page-turning stuff

Canada's visionary

A delicious page-turner

A gripping novel with a satisfying conclusion

The Testamnets is a cracking sequel to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and a timely warning about the lengths to which a patriarchal culture will go to control female sexuality

A superb and suspenseful expose of misogyny and the moral ambiguity at the heart of a fanatical regime

[A] rare combination of a rollicking thriller with major political nous told one of our greatest living writers. Essential

An era-defining masterpiece

The Testaments… lived up to the hype

Superbly written and masterfully constructs the regime of Gilead more than its predecessor was able to

The extraordinary Margaret Atwood... she's fabulous'

[A] compelling story

Atwood's sequel shines with all the acuity and brilliance of the original, whilst continuing the story with flair and modern insight

There is no language I could use to express the emotion and beauty behind Margaret Atwood's words. Her work takes you on a journey of emotion - whether you are ready to fight, be kind, be vulnerable, stay strong or simply be, she takes you there

Thrilling, a meditation on courage which asks us to consider what our own response might be were we forced to choose between meek complicity and rebellion at risk of death

She's taken our times and made us wise to them

Inspiring and deeply disturbing