The novel's brilliance lies in capturing so convincingly that state of adolescent restlessness... Aridjis’s languid prose lets these images wash over the reader, unfurling in comma-rich sentences that beautifully render a state of inertia

Sea Monsters is a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today

A mesmerising novel… Aridjis beautifully renders the perspective of a bored, intelligent, privileged teenage girl — a decadent, solipsistic daydream

Self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea

Aridjis riffs like a poet, letting each image twist and grow into the next... The novel’s strength lies in its ability to turn to the next magic trick, the next detail, the next sight. Those sights are all the more impressive when conjured solely from language. By opting out of fiction’s conventional prioritization of plot or character development, Aridjis foregrounds her ability to develop images and metaphors. The result is seductive in its multiplicity. Mallarmé would be proud

I love the way Chloe Aridjis creates her own worlds in prose, and I especially love how Sea Monsters has invented the world of adolescence and its reveries: violent and tender, logical and dreamlike – a twenty-first century essay disguised as a nineteenth-century fable

The language is precise, strange, evocative and wise... Aridjis’s novel poses far more questions than it answers, and it does so accurately and beautifully.

Reading this angsty and atmospheric novel was like busting open my adolescent 1980s veins and mainlining the entire Joy Division catalog right into my bloodstream. Just gorgeous

A surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments . . . Aridjis allows her narrative to swell and recede like the sea, along with Luisa’s capacious imagination . . . Aridjis excels at writing a life lived in the borderlands between reality and fantasy... Moreover, the novel’s precocious teenage narrative voice is replete with sentences of rare beauty and power. I may start reading it again at once

Eccentrically detailed…Aridjis scrambles your brain, not with high-modernist pyrotechnics but by the stealthier means of undermining the assumption that a novel’s words exist to advance the story…You enjoy Luisa’s company without ever being quite sure why she wants us around

Sea Monsters is destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and mesmerising novel

Aridjis’s coming-of-age novel is rich in atmosphere, and there’s an undeniable charm to its dreamlike narrative

A searingly hypnotic work, a dazzling tale of enchantment and disenchantment

Intense and impressionistic, it seems to hang on in the air long after the last page.

The prose is mesmerising with strange and beautiful observations

A dreamy, fantastical novel packed with lush description

A dreamy, wandering tale of teenage ennui and searching, and the pull of the sea . . . Aridjis’s sentences are luminescent and imagistic . . . A lovely, surreal novel

Ethereal and ruminative . . . Brilliant in her ability to get inside the head of her young narrator, Aridjis skillfully renders a slightly zonked-out atmosphere of mystery and the mind of a young romantic, resulting in a strange and hypnotic novel.

At once precise and impressionistic, [Sea Monsters] sympathetically navigates between dreams and disillusionment, while preserving intact its deeply beguiling spell

Sea Monsters is a treasure chest of Luisa’s deftly curated visions

Aridjis draws the reader in with gorgeous and poignant descriptions of setting, essayistic digressions on history and art, and moody suggestions of violence. She’s like a dreamier W. G. Sebald, or Baudelaire set to a soundtrack of Joy Division and the Cure. Further, there’s a sense of playfulness in Aridjis that a lot of people trying to write this kind of fiction never achieve

Aridjis weaves into being a magical world of youthful daydreams and desires, and yet she never quite allows us to escape the other, less magical world lurking behind it

A beautifully wrought drama that find Cassandra, now an elderly spinster, looking back on the life they shared. Utterly charming.

Fans will delight in this new novelby Gill Hornby, which ingeniouslyimagines what Jane’s sister Cassandra Austen’s own life might have been like.

This complex story reveals a clever and warm-hearted character in Cassandra, and brings us closer to one of the greatest of all English writers.

A novel that will delight Pride and Prejudice fans.

This is an engaging story about love, loss, and finding one's place in the world. A must-read for Jane Austen fans.

Through her spry, witty portrait of Jane Austen’s sister, Hornby mounts a lively defence of single women’s liberty.

Fans of Pride and Prejudice and Emma will enjoy this touching story[…] In her meticulously researchedthird novel, Gill Hornby skilfully imagines the correspondence between the sisters.

Hornby does amazingly well in the riskiest area of all, the invention of letters ostensibly written by Jane […] The television rights to this novel were sold at birth. No surprise: the dialogue is ready to roll […] People are going to love it, but I wonder if any screen adaptation will be able to convey the hidden treasure within this thoughtful story.

‘It won’t surprise me if this is one of the books of the year, it’s a delight, one of those that you don’t want to end.’

Many of the themes familiar from Austen’s novels are deftly revisited by Hornby, and the letters that are reimagined are pitch-perfect, with deeply touching confidences shared in family correspondences. You can tell this book by its cover – it’s quite lovely.

Beautiful novel[…] light hearted historical fiction which resembles Austen’s novels, a really lovely read very suitable for incoming spring’

Gill Hornby unfolds it all in her imagination.

Hornby combines a moving portrait of sisterly devotion with a comic depiction of the provincial life so brilliantly evoked in Austen's own novels

[A]t the heart of it all there's a romantic twist..."Hornby is at her best describing the complex bonds between the excellent women of her story. She describes the horrors, but also the pleasures of spinsterhood"