I read it with great delight. A delicious page-turning treat.

Totally wonderful. Touched makes me mindful of Dylan Thomas, it's so poetic and haunting; Joanna Briscoe is a truly lovely writer

a ghost story interwoven with crime, love and horror. It works on every level….Touched is a finely balanced creation, reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Briscoe’s prose is sensuous, poetic, light. The rhythm is delicately controlled. A strange, fascinating tale.

Touched is a gripping novella, a waking nightmare in the home counties that is both erotic and claustrophobic. There's a woozy atmosphere of menace, a satirical stab at Britain's post-war commuter-belt aspirations, and an elegant, postmodern, cine-literate twist…Touched has something of The Turn of the Screw, certainly, but with it, the brasher influence of Ira Levin, or Anthony Shaffer, screenwriter of The Wicker Man. …This is a haunting and disquieting parable

that sense of suffocation and slowly creeping madness is something that Touched - the latest novella from the Hammer horror imprint - expertly mines

An old fashioned, scary horror story

Haunting novella from Joanna Briscoe…a disorientating ride

A wonderfully claustrophobic horror. It's all wonderfully creepy ... Touched is thoroughly eerie, an enjoyably chilling sliver of ice on a hot summer's day

a spine-chilling tale of a creepy cottage and a mother’s terror

Deeply creepy

Briscoe builds suspense brilliantly

Touched is a terrific little ghost story …This is an eminently accessible text, bolstered by an exquisitely composed story

a ghastly gathering sense of unease never lets up… chilling tale

Intriguing novel

An eternal, melancholy story which never fails to tug at the heartstrings

Goldsworthy’s mischievous debut updates that constant trope about gaining the world and losing your soul in a contemporary London setting that is two parts Bulgakov to one part Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill

Albert has made a novel that approaches depression and maternal anxiety with candid honesty, transforming writing on motherhood forever

A hilarious, honest, and eye-opening book, this is a must have for any new mum or mum-to-be

Funny and heartfelt

Ms. Moran['s] ... funny and cheerfully dirty coming-of-age novel has a hard kernel of class awareness ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways.

there’s so much real feeling too. Johanna’s vulnerability and bravado, as she moves out of her world and falls in love is beautifully done’ or ‘ and running through it all, with a visceral power that most writers should envy, is the shame and grinding anxiety of being poor

Moran also writes brilliantly about music, and especially about what music can do. She carries Johanna through this novel with incredible verve, extravagant candour, and a lot of heart. Johanna is … a wonderful heroine. A heroine who cares, who bravely sallies forth and makes things happen, who gives of herself, who is refreshingly unashamed. She’s so confident, it’s glorious

an entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable…Moran is in danger of becoming to female masturbation what Keats was to Nightingales…

rude, big-hearted, wise-cracking novel…so filthy she’ll make you blush

This is going to be a bestseller…A sharp, hilarious and controversial read

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh