Bracing, maddening and utterly compelling

Tremendous, maddening, addictive, gripping

It is a pen-and-paper virtual reality; after reading it you feel that another past has been downloaded into your mind

Breathtaking... Knausgaard has a rare talent for making everyday life seem fascinating

For Knausgaard's obsessive fans, this cycle is the most exciting literary project of our times... Knausgaard is the most humane writer in the world… He writes beautifully… It is precisely in the commonness of the lovingly recorded details that these books spin their magic

Raw, fast, improvisatory, unfettered. It’s addictive high-wire writing in which he unflinchingly reveals everything about himself

[Some Rain Must Fall] is Knausgaard at his best… It’s a rare novelist who writes about student bars and the Happy Mondays at the same time as yearning for spiritual salvation

Part of Knausgaard’s appeal is believability: his books may be called novels but we read them as memoirs. The meticulous detail seems to guarantee their authenticity… Childhood, sex, love, art, work and death are there too, writ small from his own perspective, but compellingly observed

Reverberates with life’s core questions… In its depiction of the torment of writer’s block and a young adult’s struggle to construct a sense of self, both on and off the page, it is brilliant

Courageous, haunting, and beautiful-with EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED, Luiza Sauma takes us on a breathtaking voyage through both the farthest reaches of space and the innermost depths of the human soul

Tinged with melancholy and yearning, this novel is wry and frequently beautiful, and its culmination is surprising and deeply moving

What Sauma captures so excellently is the low level anxiety that hums through everyday life

Her writing is beautiful

Weird, wonderful and beautifully written

Sauma has the horrors of the workplace nailed with satirical precision

Absorbing and ambitious. Filled with sharp observations about the way in which we live now, Everything You Ever Wanted is both an acute satire of our social-media dominated times, and a haunting examination of depression and anxiety rendered in diamond sharp prose with barely a wasted word. . . It deserves to be on every prize longlist this year

For fans of Black Mirror

Millennial angst meets sci-fi

Sublime

An arresting debut about memory and trauma. In this respect and others, it resembles Julian Barnes's Man Booker-winner, The Sense of an Ending.

Luiza Sauma's debut novel is that rare thing: a completely absorbing, brilliantly-designed, literary work.

Her writing is beautiful. I am sure I'll see her name on the spine of many a novel to come

Rebellious and subversive... Williams excels at visceral descriptions of bodies and food alike

A bold and fresh story about food, friendship and feminism...compelling reading.

Bold, wild and witty

A small utopia celebrating the intoxications of female friendship and standing as a private bulwark against patriarchy

Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

Nation, published in 2008 (this year's award catchment runs from August 2008-September 2009), is an extraordinarily complicated tale about God, tradition and loss. Yet it is told with beautiful simplicity and rollicking readability.

Funny and profound, Nation is much more than an adventure story, pitting reason against religion and offering an alternative perspective on world history and culture.

As Pratchett says: "Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you." His wit is on every page; his world surpasses ours, his writing is weird and wonderful. No, weirdly wonderful. It is gripping but put the book down to ponder the thoughts inside to unearth a parallel universe. Terry Pratchett is worth more than his idiom; his teachings contain more philosophical thought than I would have ever thought possible.

A brilliant first novel

A slick debut pulled off with brio, Swan Song is glamorous, vivid and sometimes even daring in its intelligence

A dazzling read

Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades.

With a grounding in history, it is a fascinating read about the deepest secrets of an iconic author.

Intoxicating

Swan Song is utterly divine.It swept me up and I just couldn't put it down ... it is the writing in this debut novel that astounds most of all. It is vivid, addictive and whips up a terrific portrait of a deeply contradictory and complex man, contrasting scenes from his unorthodox childhood with those from the gilded bubble he ended up in that he lanced through his own actions.

A sumptuous look at the icons of Manhattan's high society scene in the mid-20th century ... An immersive readthat will have you questioning real histories versus the ones we create for ourselves.