Proves that the best science fiction can be not only socially relevant and thought-provoking, but entertaining . . . a brilliantly reimagined near-future Africa . . . he interweaves ecological and political intrigue with Senegalese folk myths to tell the ultimately uplifting story of a continent sadly neglected in SF.

Uncannily in tune with the time it was written . . . at once dreamlike and harrowingly believable, this is not a comforting read. It is, however, a gripping and frightening one.

A multi-layered narrative that builds momentum and depth and inexorably draws the reader in . . . there is a dignity to this book, a quiet power and charm that breathes life into its pages . . . this is a book of prophetic realism, determined optimism and magical storytelling that sets it apart.

Timely and intelligent . . . blends magic realism and action to poetic and thrilling ends . . . it's packed full of fun, danger, stolen moments and hypocrisy - much like the modern world.

As speculative fiction it is completely on the money . . . an important commentary on present-day headlines and a prescient warning of what we can expect if our ways do not change . . . highly readable . . . Chait is a very good writer, juggling several emotionally powerful concepts with the timeless magic of aural storytelling.

One of the most enjoyable reads I've had lately, and now readers can see what haiku really was like and what it can do. Kern is a marvellous translator ... The illustrations further add to the enjoyment. It's a book that should be in the library of anyone who loves Japanese literature

For anyone even remotely interested in the origins of haiku and the claims of tradition [...] this extraordinary tome is a must-read

Praise for Tom:

Genius

If you loved The Glorious Heresies and are looking for the next terrific Irish author, here be Ciaran McMenamin. . . . a cross between Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland, . . . sprinkled with a warm enveloping humour and compassion. It is that good.

A ribald, wise-cracking joyride through young lives lit up by clubs, drugs and ecstatic love. Skintown sings of escape, and the loyalty to music and rapture over the politics of hate.

An exuberant style which vividly captures the wildness of of the 90s rave culture.

[A] lyrical novel… Heart-wrenching and hauntingly beautiful, with dark undertones

Subtle and piercing… Phillips keeps on taking risks and telling powerful stories

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

A brilliant first novel

A slick debut pulled off with brio, Swan Song is glamorous, vivid and sometimes even daring in its intelligence

A dazzling read

Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades.

With a grounding in history, it is a fascinating read about the deepest secrets of an iconic author.

Intoxicating

Swan Song is utterly divine.It swept me up and I just couldn't put it down ... it is the writing in this debut novel that astounds most of all. It is vivid, addictive and whips up a terrific portrait of a deeply contradictory and complex man, contrasting scenes from his unorthodox childhood with those from the gilded bubble he ended up in that he lanced through his own actions.

A sumptuous look at the icons of Manhattan's high society scene in the mid-20th century ... An immersive readthat will have you questioning real histories versus the ones we create for ourselves.

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