A beautifully written and far-reaching exploration of Japanese culture from first-time novelist Susan Barker

Barker has given it the pace and excitement of a thriller - or of the manga comics to which Watanabe is addicted. Funny, crisply written and engaging, Sayonora Bar offers sharp insights into some of the less palatable realities of life in 21st century Japan'

With dry humour and crisp observation, Barker conveys the inner chaos masked by the external regimens of a society where intimacy is contrived, and loyalty is strained. Japan has not, for a long time, been made to seem so accessible, or so remote

New author Susan Barker has set her edgy, sly debut in a hostess lounge

A stunningly eclectic debut. Original, often perplexing, always intriguing, Sayonara Bar is a showpiece of breathtaking new talent

Highly original ... A major achievement by an exciting new author.

A fluid style and writes sentences reminiscent of Haruki Murakami...Barker's descriptions are spot on

A poet of great eloquence and delicate skill, an exquisite image-maker who can work wonders with the great tradition of line and stanza. Her voice has an astonishing resonance.

With extraordinary breadth of erudition, a sensitivity to different cultural environments and powerful visual alertness, this collection has all the characteristics we have learned to expect from Ruth Padel. Readers will be struck by the mature command of these poems as well as their great range of subject and feeling.

The latest literary sensation

Neill bucks the chick-lit trend with prose that's clever and endearing, and frazzled parents will love the way she nails the sticky, hair-pulling mania of domestic life

A deftly executed domestic comedy

Hilarious . . . Plays with the chaos and comedy of 30-something metropolitan maternity and brings it to an unexpectedly moving conclusion

Fine and wonderfully original debut novel.

A hauntingly brilliant first novel about how we respond to the past... I envied, as well as admired, this author's literary command. A star is born.

One of the year’s most impressive first novels…Hunters in the Snow’s ambition, scope and assurance…are thrilling and admirable, and make for a very fine book indeed.

Wonderfully lyrical… Ambitious and moving

extraordinary first novel... a 21st-century War and Peace

Both heart wrenching and uplifting, a stunning, intricately plotted, brilliantly written, tour-de-force of a novel that burns into the memory

Mr Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully... its ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is one of the most accomplished and affecting books I've read in a very long time.

At the start of Marra's ambitious first novel, set in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War, eight year-old Havaa escapes the Russian soldiers that are carting off her father and flees a home set alight. Marra then plunges into a complex, beautifully crafted series of events, full of secrets and elegant moments, all wreathed in a frozen world.

Some novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel. Taking place in war-ravaged Chechnya across a decade, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a stunning debut, following a timid but determined country doctor and the girl he rescues once her father is arrested and presumably killed. Marra elegantly slides across time and perspective, mastering an omniscient voice that reveals each character’s future, present, and past, all in acrobatic sentences that leap through time.

A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles… Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly… I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book

Marra is a brisk and able story-teller, and he moves deftly between a number of characters who are drawn into contact by the war… The writing is vivid throughout

Original, insightful