Smart, shimmering and thought-provoking…McCarthy isn’t a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he’s a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful — in other words, compulsively readable.

Should you read the new Tom McCarthy book? (A: Yes. Always yes.)

Dazzling and elusive… a magisterial ethnographic portrait of our overstimulated, interconnected, simulacra-addicted times.

The kind of strange and ambitious fiction that you feared might have died with J. G. Ballard. ...Provokes and beguiles and, at the point of revelation, it withholds. On finishing it you will have the powerful urge to throw it across the room, then the powerful urge to pick it up to read again. And that’s what’s so brilliant.

Confusing, clever and about to be massive.

For page-turning ideas, it’s a must.

Nails the modern condition of information overload

Satin Island is an undeniably dazzling piece of writing, a perfect tight circle of interlocking motifs, mini-treatises and allusions.

A Kafka for the Google Age.

Gripping... an elegant and eerie tale.

McCarthy’s crisp, clean prose is stimulating, his concepts original and his visual imagery powerful.

[An] entertaining slice of experimental fiction.

Booker-nominated author Tom McCarthy’s latest offering is lean, smart and infuriating.

McCarthy's writing is cool and elegant, descriptive, yet informal and conversational.

An intellectually challenging and highly engaging work of art.

It is dead-clever, very funny, insanely ambitious, sometimes insane, essentially brilliant and commendably engaged with the way we’re living our lives right now.

Reading a McCarthy novel is like being in a McCarthy novel: everything is part of a fizzing network, the scope of which can never be fully apprehended.

Without beginning, middle, end – and especially lacking centre! – the novel comes to a halt, leaving the reader in a gorgeous daze of symbol and cypher, whose meaning is so clear, and yet tantalizingly opaque.

Satin Island is clever, vogue, slick and sleek.

Packed with intriguing and intellectual ideas… refreshingly thought-provoking.

Slender, foxily postmodern.

The bleeding edge of science fiction is Satin Island.

In Satin Island the narrator, U, takes us on a journey through the modern world of ideas, theories and references. It’s a wonderfully intense experience – as soon as I’d finished I wanted to read it again.

Convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists.

Favourite novel of 2015.

A darkly funny and disturbing meditation on the intricacies and insubstantiality of our technology-ridden times. McCarthy is one of the most daring, most ambitious and most subtle of what at my age I can all the younger generation of writers.

The novel often reads like a dramatic monologue, a very modern stream of consciousness, akin to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake… McCarthy’s novel is innovative, well crafted and challenging… This novel is breaking new ground, a breath of fresh air, at times a tour de force.

McCarthy has put his finger on something, and he’s nailed it very precisely. It’s how we live now. All the information we process every day. What it’s doing to us.