Extraordinary. Entertainment of a very high order… One of the best books of the year

Dazzling... A cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling. A lively tour de force

Powers...can nail emotional complexities with precision, while using his characters to explore how emerging technologies might shape our lives

It’s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book... If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century, which writer would he be? He’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big

An extraordinary and brilliant novel of ideas

Tense and heartbreaking

An ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work... It soars and spins... The novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty

A splendid intellectual adventure [and] a heartbreaking love story

Nothing less than brilliant

A perfect novel

In Olive Kitteridge, Strout has created one of those rare characters...so vivid and humorous they seems to take on a life independent of the story framing them

Elizabeth Strout is... one of the undisputed heavyweights of generous, clear-eyed domestic realism

A special, precious book...full of hope and humanity

Funny, sad, tender and truthful, this is pure joy

A terrific writer

If you want to see what the policies from Whitehall that keep the working classes struggling look like in human guise, when placed in an environment where their identities have to be negotiated daily, That Reminds Me is the viewfinder you need. It’s post-Thatcher reality in the inner city, clouded over by racism, infused with West African stoicism, narrated by a voice that has known something different. It’s life as a growing boy experiences it, with a powerless wonder; it’s messy and beautiful, fractured but eloquent. K’s story reminds us that our scars should not strip us of our dignity.

In weaving emotion into literary gold, truth has never been this painfully told, or this beautiful.

The best poetry out since Warsan Shire.

A fast-paces, dense, poetic, original and bewitching story by an important new writer. That Reminds Me will long be remembered by readers.

Deserves the same recognition that greeted Max Porter's similarly constructed fictionalised memoir Grief is the Thing With Feathers... uses its broken-up style to explore experiences that defy easy comprehension. There is nothing indulgent about this quietly observed account of a black man Owusu gives the name of K... There is a physicality to his writing, the impression of incoherent feelings being wrestled into shape, that lends his book heft. K's future is, in the end, ambiguous, but Owusu's surely gleams bright.

A bold prose poem written in novella form, That Reminds Me is one of the most powerful pieces of writing to be published in 2019.

The latest release from Stormzy's increasingly impressive #Merky imprint, this is a stylistically ambitious memoir of a precarious Tottenham upbringing. Owusu writes with a poet's gift for seemingly incidental observation in a potent story that's left deliberately, troublingly fragmented.

A virtuosic debut by a raw new talent. An honest and timely evaluation of a black man's struggle to belong and later come to terms with failing mental health. Utterly convincing and deeply sad, Owusu's storytelling will bring readers to tears.

Derek Owusu is not just a brilliant writer, he’s a deep thinker. Anything he does is relevant, and meaningful. It would be easy to say that he is mainly concerned with the condition of young black men, but in truth he speaks truth to all of us.

A magnificent achievement.

Written with candour and verve, and full of moments of heart-stopping anguish and beauty.