made me howl with laughter - literally

Keenan writes like an uncloseted Coward. Not high-minded satire but somethign much rarer - pure-hearted camp

As with the very best literature, its crystalline readability fast eclipses its topicality

[A] devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual's place in the world

A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. A novel that fuses the real with the surreal - perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet

No conventional love story. [An] exceptionally moving and powerful novel

Publisher's description. In an unnamed city swollen by refugees but not yet at war, two young people meet and fall in love. They pretend not to hear the sound of bombs getting closer every night. But one day soon they will have to escape this place, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world.

Impressive... Exit West confirms Hamid's reputation as a brilliant ventriloquist who is deeply engaged with the most pressing issues of our time

Powerful... Hamid unfolds the disintegration of civic life and the couple's poignant intimacy with vivid, economical strokes. Hamid is the master of the illuminating metaphor

Wry [and] intelligent... Part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable for a world of porous borders, Exit West is a thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant

A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic

Breathlessly relevant... Hamid's book could hardly be more timely; it's addictively readable and brilliantly written to boot

Astonishing

Exit West packs such an emotional wallop you will be thinking about it for days afterwards. For Hamid is not only telling a story, he is asking what sort of a world we want to live in.

A love story as spare, haunting and spiritually powerful as a haiku. All my life I will remember Nadia and Saeed, their humanity against a surreal, broken landscape. Exit West is Hamid's finest book.

It's a terrific, beautifully constructed, important novel of our time. This is what we expect fiction to do: to examine our age but also to cast an eye on the past and - very brilliantly in this case - on the future too. I love it.

Exit West is a masterpiece. It stretches the boundaries of the real just enough to make a point about the state of immigrants and refugees in the contemporary world. But it's very much grounded in reality. It's a beautiful book.

Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation

A man born to write

The voice of a changing continent. A writer at the top of his game

A masterclass in the power of prose that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt lost.

Baume’s writing is distinguished by remarkable precision and lucidity

A fast-paced, ambitious, hallucinatory mystery

Marvellous, original and intelligent. Kunzru writes like a master storyteller... There's simply nothing [he] couldn't manage in prose

Publisher's description. Electrifying, subversive and wildly original, White Tears is a ghost story and a love story, a story about lost innocence and historical guilt. This unmissable novel penetrates the heart of a nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge and exploitation, and holding a mirror up to the true nature of America today.

Compulsively readable, masterly - a tour de force

Riveting from the very first page, I was completely addicted... A literary thriller and a timely, unsparing excavation of the very real spectre of race in America's past and present. White Tears is proof that Kunzru is one of the finest novelists of his generation...

Hari Kunzru is an incredibly versatile writer who is alert to the inequalities in the world... Powerful and complex, White Tears is a novel about abuses of wealth and power. Brilliantly orchestrated, unforgettable and devastating

Hari Kunzru is one of our most important novelists

Kunzru's engagingly wired prose and agile plotting sweep all before them

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly