A story of love in a cool climate, intensely romantic and weepily beautiful...it is startlingly different: a true original

Casablanca remade Japanese style...It is dream-like writing, laden with scenes which have the radiance of a poem

This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths

This book aches...an eloquent treatise on the vertiginous, irrational powers of love and desire

Impressively written and structured... Above all, the novel is memorable for its unflinchingly extreme treatment of romantic love

Discover what a fine writer Murakami is with this engrossing examination of a male mid-life crisis... He enthrallingly teases out the risks, culminating in a headily sensual finale

A beautiful, atmospheric novel sustained by Murakami's flair for philosophical mediation at its most human

A wise and beautiful book.

A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.

Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction.

Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.

His most deeply moving novel.

Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.

A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.

Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.

Murakami has once again produced a perfect gem

Murakami weaved his mesmeric story-telling power once again with this new book…but still bearing the unmistakable purity of prose, economy of expression and simplicity of style that characterise his writing

A mysterious story about friendship, heartbreak and confronting the past, this book is surreal, existential and, therefore, classic Murakami

The tale is as absorbing as the prose is beautiful

This is classic Murakami, an isolated character struggling to make his way through a world both deceptively simple and utterly fantastical, his story told through prose infused with all the beauty and meaning of a Kyoto tea ceremony

His versatility and ability to craft a story is spellbinding… Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a fine story that held my attention until the end.

Loneliness, sexual ambiguity and emotional repression- the perfect recipe for a novel that put Murakami back on my list of unputdownable authors

Kafkaesque, unusual and packed with sex and confusion, this is high-end prose… Murakami is remarkably prolific… A weird and very wonderful descent into the madness of contemporary Tokyo.

Nolan's narrator rips and picks at the threads and scabs of desire, hedonism and self-worth... in this searing first novel, Nolan is holding up a fantastically intense mirror to her protagonist and letting us make up our own mind about whether or not we will look away.

There are flashes of brilliance throughout, reminiscent of John Berger.

Acts of Desperation creates an immersive experience of toxic romance through a suffocating and addictive narrative.

Painful, sharp and absorbing.

A reflection on compulsion, addiction and what it's like to exist as a young woman in a world that is hostile to you. Read the first page and you won't be able to stop.

Nolan...stakes out thrilling new territory in an intense, unflinching novel that is always intelligent and utterly unafraid of ugliness.

A devastating stripping back of the gendered and politicised conditions that shape desire, a revelation of the unnerving ways we are made vulnerable to others in unequal systems. Its crisp, knowing prose is unparalleled, its anger remarkable.

Nolan's intelligent, elegant first novel, a gripping portrait of love turned toxic.

The star feature of Nolan's narration is her ability to cut through received ideas about women, relationships and even rape. Her headlong, fearless prose, feels like salt wind on cracked lips. You wince and you thrill.

A raw read of vulnerability, desperation, and most definitely a new voice in fiction

A thrilling read...if you want a visceral, honest, unputdownable summer read then this is it. You'll devour it in a day.

A very elegant novel, with coercive control at the core. She has such a strong voice and not a sentence is extraneous

I read this in one go... I found it raw, honest, brutal and real.

Written with acerbic style and wit, this is an intoxicatingly good look at romantic obsession, delusion and desire.

Beautifully written…and the short chapters keep things moving at an addictively fast pace. Most importantly, it’s shamelessly real