Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms

A dizzying survey of the last 90 years of Spanish history... Margaret Jull Costa's incandescent translation carries along Esteban's turbulent torrent... When this book finally releases its grip, you may find your lapels sullied by grubby fingerprints you are in no rush to scrub out

Chirbes, one of Spain’s premier writers, is at his best when fully immersed, as he is in this novel. If Proust and an Old Testament prophet had collaborated to write about Spain’s recession, it might have been something like the writing here - agonized, dense, full of rage, and difficult to forget

On the Edge, Chirbes’s masterpiece, arrives as a message in a bottle among all the cans, rusting appliances, and tangled tackle. The fumes of the lagoon mix with the lingering sulfur of the Atocha railway-station bombing; the Spanish economy has all but collapsed. Who, or what, is to blame? Chirbes’s novel accuses everyone

A moving, densely detailed portrait of people without hope

On the Edge is masterful, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating center

This is the great novel of the crisis. The corrosive voice of Rafael Chirbes paints a portrait of a universe of unemployment and disappointment?the long hangover that follows the party of corruption

Literature, as Adorno once said, is a clock that keeps ticking. But it is also the best tool for understanding the world when reality is torn to shreds. Both rules are strictly complied with by great authors. And Rafael Chirbes is one of them

Chirbes has lent his main narrator an engaging voice of cultured pessimism… On the Edge is at its best when it locks the reader into Esteban’s fluid internal monologue. From this a fascinating portrait emerges of a whole society… This is a disquieting and consistently illuminating novel.

Stand[s] out among contemporary Spanish fiction.

Exhilarating… Chirbes is a novelist who asks a lot of his readers… If you meet the demand, you are richly rewarded.

Over the past decade, [Chirbes] has become justly celebrated in Spain for his ambitious, panoramic novels about the economic crisis, political corruption and their attendant social ills – one of his best works produced in this line is [On The Edge]’

One of the finest Spanish novelists of his generation… An exhilarating ride.

An impassioned examination of the Spanish collapse.

A wise, topical and important book.

We benefit greatly from this rangy, relentless and damning view from below

Beautifully written... profoundly sad

A powerful novel about one of the defining issues of our age.

At its best, Mahajan’s prose sings with novelty, sensuousness and empathy, keenly alive to many kinds of pleasure.

[A] thoughtful second novel

This is a superb novel… In mimicking the bomb’s structure, Mahajan creates its opposite: a careful, discriminate and moral work of art

A steadily intelligent novel.

A novel that takes us all the way around the bombing, a story about the lives of the victims, the survivors and the bomber. A novel about India that is a novel about the world... A heartbreakingly true and daring novel...that can truly help us understand ourselves, and others, in the dangerous world in which we live

Ask[s] us to consider...lives which rarely find themselves mentioned on the pages of newspapers, let alone in novels

Karan Mahajan's masterful novel explores the aftermath of a small bomb detonation in the '90s in Delhi, and the many people whose lives it alters – from the families of victims to the bombers themselves. With great empathy and no lack of humour, Mahajan shows the multitudinous sides to the kind of story that we usually read a line or two about in a newspaper, or hear short mention of on television

The Association of Small Bombs deftly shifts the reader’s sympathy back and forth between the two men who pull off a relatively insignificant small blast, and the people, sometimes dislikeable, who suffer the consequences. But the moral power of his novel comes from his determination to take individual losses – and choices – seriously, rather than assigning a scale whereby the degree of tragedy is calibrated by high or low body-counts

Karan Mahajan is a writer with great command and acute and original insights. He offers what few can: a stereoscopic view of reality in dark, contemporary times

The Association of Small Bombs is...packed with small wonders of beauty and heartbreak that are impossible to resist

It’s a brave and frequently devastating novel whose themes of displacement and dehumanisation are all too timely

The last book that made my heart race? That’d be Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom: completely propulsive and horrifying and astonishing

A powerful novel about alienation and the illusion of freedom.

Stories of displacement, alienation and inequality add up to dynamic, life-affirming symphony – albeit one punctuated with discordant and unsettling notes.

Mukherjee confronts head-on the appalling deprivation and the caste stigma that bedevil so many lives, and the result is as powerful as it is disturbing.

Mesmerising complexity and the sharpness mixed with compassion and empathy. All the stories are beautifully written… Long after I finished it I realized the characters were still with me, vivid, compelling, haunting