Mysterious, menacing, enthralling and mind-bending ... a masterpiece of compression

Pereira Maintains is small only in size. Its themes are great ones?courage, betrayal, fidelity, love, corruption; and its treatment of them is subtle, skillful, and clear. It's so clear, in fact, that you can see a very long way down, into the heart of a flawed but valiant human being, into the sickness of a nation, into the depths of political evil. It's the most impressive novel I've read for years, and one of the very few that feels truly necessary

Gripping and unexpected

Brilliant ... you'll go on thinking about the characters for weeks

A work in the high aesthetic mode, a historical novel cast in delicately evocative prose and filled with witty references to the great figures of modern European literature. In it Italians could examine their political consciences through an artful image of another country's past. The pleasures to be had from Pereira Maintains are rich and varied, but best of all it's very enjoyable

Tabucchi's prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept

A stunningly good novel, and it goes on getting better in one's head after one has stopped reading it - it works as an experience - something that has happened to one, which is of course the proof of great writing

A brilliant, profound book that also manages to be a thriller

Reading Checkout 19 filled me with joy, it is so good! The writing is exceptional; rich, playful and at the same time full of presence and urgency. It is a book about literature, how reading both expands our world and takes us away from it, and it is also a book about life {when it is] at its most vulnerable, and these two merge into the question: how can we take back our own story? What is our own story? Bennett writes like no one else, she is in complete control of the language, skilfull and innovative in an almost joycean way. She is a rare talent, and Checkout 19 is a masterful novel.

I'll remember this book for its disarmingly figurative language and its subtle observational humour...Bennett...traces one person's idiosyncratic, recursive artistic becoming - not just the reading, writing, and cigarette smoking but the relationships and experiences that unlock new ways of seeing.

This is the book - the one you've been looking for. It really is. It's full of desire, rage, mischief, opulence. This is the book. It's about what's important - about finding it, grasping it, losing it. This is the book.

On the basis of just one book, the mysterious Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett established a devoted following pretty much worldwide. This is her new book to shake the world anew.

CHECKOUT 19 has radically altered my idea of what is possible in a novel, while being continuously gripping, sometimes deeply moving and often very funny. There are long passages in here which feel touched by the hand of god, more channelled than written.

There's no one in whose language and rhythms I'd rather immerse than Claire-Louise Bennett, as her character plumbs her own past and a personal history of literature, via classrooms and train stations, supermarket aisles and Viennese opera houses, pickled cucumber and cheese on toast. Witty, moving and propulsive, Checkout-19 makes a triumphant case for what novels - and reading - can do.

A profound and very funny book about growth and promise, and how not to kill them off; about women reading and writing and how they survive... thrilling.

An extraordinary document about the richness of inner life... It is rare to feel the sensation of another mind as vividly as in this radiant book.

Unconventional and imaginative... this is a book about memory, reading and writing that is intelligent and often absorbing.

Checkout 19 inches close to what it is to love... The novel is defiantly told through impulse - the impulse to write a certain character, to read a particular book, to say something or stay quiet - and in this way, a woman, and a writer, emerges.

Checkout 19 is a fresh take on the coming-of-age novel-one in which we don't already know how the story will end, or if it will have an 'ending' at all. Bennett manages to convince the reader that somewhere, her narrator continues to think and ponder and live and wrestle with being in a body, like the rest of us.

A fantastically various novel consisting of seven sections in which we loosely follow a narrator...at different ages and in different places - through an intricate collage of ideas, sensations and emotions.

Claire-Louise Bennett is a once-in-a-generation talent. Plugging into and transforming the rich (if much suppressed) seam of literary history that runs via Ann Quin, B. S. Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann and Mary (not Percy) Shelley all the way back to Milton and beyond, she affirms a real belief in literature-as-literature: the confidence to let it do its thing on its own terms, and a jubilant pleasure in watching it all unfurl.

Surprisingly exhilarating, packing both an intellectual and emotional punch... Checkout 19 offers plenty to relish: fizzing sentences, set pieces that are funny, alarming or both a convincingly fractured portrait of a convincingly fractured narrator.

This is one of the most extraordinary books it has been my privilege to review... elegant... marvellous... phenomenally engineered... If I were a Booker judge again, I would move heaven and earth to get this on the shortlist.

An immersion in literature serves to inspire in a larger sense, to inflame a feeling of wonder and possibility - a dynamic not only evoked but also achieved by this elatingly risky and irreducible book.

That we come to life through reading is the idea that grounds these free-roaming stories. Experiencing Checkout 19 is equally earth-shaking; mundanity is spun into the magical... This is a book that is meant to be read backwards as much as forwards - turning back the pages, fishing for jewels missed the first time around.

A book that refuses to abide by conventional expectations of storytelling... What emerges, all the more affectingly for being so serpentine, is an invigorating portrait of the artist as a young - and then older, surer - woman... Turn the final page of this most uncompromising of works and you'll be filled with admiration for the way in which its freewheeling momentum turns out to have been so sinuously choreographed, its every mystery, commonplace and apparently defunct deviation mesmerically apposite

Bennett's stunning debut introduced us to a writer of extraordinary talent, and this follow-up is sure to cement her position among the finest contemporary storytellers.

[An] intriguing, at times hallucinogenic, debut novel.

Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 is a book unlike anything you will have read before... at times a fast changing novel, at others a magnificent listing of a life lived in books, and at others a smartly written polemic on the vicissitudes of contemporary society, it's simply unclassifiable.

Brilliantly clever and brilliantly fun

Encompassing literary criticism, suggestive fables, feminist polemic, a portrait of the artist, and a phenomenology of reading, [Checkout 19] transfixes on both the right page and the left. Bennett marvels once again.

Ambitious, unsettling and funny, this book is full of desire and mischief with surprising results.

Prize-winning author Jenni Fagan does not disappoint with her latest novel, Luckenbooth, which is easily her most compelling yet. In her usual poetic style, Fagan tells of a nine-storey Edinburgh tenement just off the Royal Mile that is creaking with secrets. Throughout this haunting novel, characters' secrets and memories live on in the howling gales of the spirit world, desperate to re-enter their lives. The narrative takes us through eight decades - from 1910 to 1999 - working its way up all nine floors of the building in hopscotch fashion, allowing for an intriguing interpretation of 20th-century life in the capital. Prepare to be transported into a Fagan's weird and wonderful imagination. It is a whirlwind read and one that I could not put down until the final page had turned.

As sexy and horrifying as any fairy story, it is a book concerned, not only with a structure, but with structures: alphabetical, architectural, societal, what they are built upon and how they crumble.

An Edinburgh tenement building is haunted by tall stories and unnerving strangers, from William Burroughs to the devil's daughter, in this weird and wonderful gothic confection.

Her "world building" is highly effective, and each character fully inhabits their decade. Fagan's writing is anchored in societal issues, the wrongs done and the ways individuals have challenged those wrongs and asserted their individuality and sexuality in ways that might make them seem misfits, outcasts. Fagan certainly pulls no punches and is determined that these passionate, authentic stories should not be confined to the periphery.

A deliciously weird gothic horror

An ambitious and ravishing novel that will haunt me long after

Ambitious in scope… The physical atmosphere of the Bass Rock and its surroundings are wonderfully evoked… But it is the relationships between women in this tessellated work that triumph... I wholly recommend this book.

Wyld is often praised for her lyrical prose, and The Bass Rock is most certainly a continuation of this form.

[A] dark, beautiful and funny gothic family saga for the #MeToo generation… an atmospheric book that transports you within a few sentences… The tension is always building as the story takes on an otherworldly dimension.

The Bass Rock is complex, rich, challenging… Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Bass Rock offers a universal history of subjugation and oppression… Violence…runs through the book like veins in marble… Vivid and gripping.

A gripping look at three women's stories across four centuries.

Evie Wyld’s passion for horror shines through in the setting of this novel.

Utterly enthralling… [Wyld’s] eye for human foibles and idiosyncrasy is incredibly sharp, and this novel once again exhibits her bravura way with narrative structure… Dark, disturbing and very sophisticated.

[An] intensely absorbing gothic novel, which weaves together the fate of three women across three centuries. That it can also comfortably accommodate episodes of off-the-wall, Fleabag-esque hilarity confirms the acclaimed Wyld's brilliance.

Wyld's thought-provoking plots separate this book from many others on the shelves... Wyld's three narratives are artfully crafted to suit the shifting time frames.

Wyld's ingeniously linked narratives weave a haunting tale of fear and defiance.

A novel of such subtlety and hope