an excellent novel, a model of restraint and quiet literary sophistication

[A] luminous debut novel… This is a book that demanded to be written... With a light touch, Faye dramatises the terrible nostalgia of having lost not only a childhood but also a whole world to war

An evocative portrait of what it means to lose one’s freedom and innocence. Gaël Faye’s literary powers lie in his unbridled honesty and his effortless prose. He is a writer of great promise and grace

Unforgettable… Gaël Faye’s talent is breathtaking; no country that can give the world a writer like him should ever be called small

as beautiful as it is painful... It's easy to see why it set the French literary scene alight. This is one you won't be abandoning in the hotel library when you leave.

a masterpiece in bringing home the first-hand realities of war... It's heart-wrenching and beautiful and distressingly authentic. Everyone should read it.

This beautiful coming-of-age novel conveys a heart-rending desire for peace and harmony. It sets forth a vision of the world that is poetic rather than political, where horror is displaced by wonder.

A magnificent book… a master-stroke of a first novel

Precise and potent...deeply affecting... The juxtaposition of everyday growing pains and the fallout from atrocities is heightened by Faye's lovely prose, which builds a heartrending portrait of the end of childhood

Gaël Faye’s words are a mix of such precision, gentleness and gravitas that finishing this first novel feels like coming out of a heartrending embrace.

A very personal and intimate novel about an African childhood cut through by socio-political turbulence… Gaël Faye has evoked the darkest pages of contemporary Africa without tipping into pathos

A literary revelation, subtle and powerful

Gael Faye is a revelation. Small Country is a luminous and poignant novel about childhood, war, exile and identity… this is literature at its most powerful

Triumphant

Writing that is beautiful, sad and funny. A poetic ‘cry to the world’ about the existence of Gabriel, his family, his friends and everyone else. Before they became “a bunch of exiles, refugees, immigrants and migrants"

a melancholic tale of a paradise lost

In the summer months, there are two categories of books: those we take on holiday and leave behind in the sand, and those that make their mark on us for life. Small Country by Gaël Faye is firmly part of the latter category.

A literary phenomenon

Small Country is a big novel

The dizzying enterprise of a childhood reclaimed… [Gaël Faye] has understood how to put words on this earth that cannot be summed up by a mass grave

Gaël Faye makes us smile, despite the seriousness of his words

What is autobiographical, and what imagined? In the end it doesn’t matter, when he Gaël Faye gives life to the lost land of his childhood, with poetry and modesty

Small Country is a stirring and graceful tale of stolen innocence and fragmented identity. Hopeful, raw and deeply human, it is a modern classic in the making.

An excellent novel, a model of restraint and quiet literary sophistication

Cherry, Nico Walker’s outstanding debut, is a hard-hitting, ghoulishly funny novel about drug addiction, war and bank robbery.

Heartbreaking, unadorned, radically absent of pretense, Cherry is the debut novel America needs now, a letter from the frontlines of opioid addiction and, almost subliminally, a war story.

Nico Walker’s Cherry is a wrenching, clear-eyed stare-down into the abyss of war, addiction and crime, a dark tumble into scumbaggery, but it’s also deeply humane and truly funny. That is one of the reasons I love it so much: it makes you laugh and ache at the same time, in the manner of the great Denis Johnson.

One of the most exciting new American novelists.

Heavily indebted to the profane blood, guts, bullets, and opiate-strewn absurdities dreamed up by Thomas McGuane, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, Cherry tells a story that feels infinitely more real, and undeniably tougher than the rest.

A bruising dispatch from the frontline of the American opioid crisis… the final quarter [of Cherry] rushes by in a cold sweat.

[An] incendiary debut… Nico Walker writes with real rhythm, exhibiting a poet’s discrimination about adjectival choice and the relative length of clauses. It is a rare and remarkable achievement to turn such suffering into a novel of such finely calibrated beauty.

A gritty, addictive read.

I think everyone should read it – it is so horrific.

A well-received return to form

Astonishingly bold novel… [It] is Amis’s best work in years

Amis’s best work since Money