The Adult is a tremendous novel. It takes its place with some of the very best of its genre – the right of passage. Very few people can do it well. Stretch has done it superbly well. I’m not surprised it won the Somerset Maugham Award. I’m sure it will go on to be widely read and cited. I do hope so

Very funny, beautifully wrought

A properly bollock-droppingly brilliant novel

I knew from the first page that this was going to be a very funny book, but I didn't realise it would have so much heart and be so beautiful

So enjoyable... The Adult is closer to a state-of-the-nation novel than any typical bildungsroman

A ribald, well-observed, coming-of-age comedy… Beautifully wrought mockery of everything from smoothie bars to Gary Barlow’s early solo career

Bursting with wit… addictive

Warm, funny and nostalgic enough to have you digging out your Global Hypercolor T-shirt and fluoro toweling socks

Raucously funny and achingly sad. Written with thrilling verve and wince-making acuity, The Adult marks Joe Stretch out as a unique and vital voice

Savage, hilarious, uncannily moving, and true. It's the first novel I've read that burns with all the madness, sadness and refracted terror of right now, and everyone should read it. Right now

This is a book which does more than just take you on a journey through the last twenty years. It also has a lot to say about family eccentricities, about childhood and adulthood and the difficulties faced in trying to be either, given the times we live alongside

The book is magnificent, understated, full of gentle mind grenades

Funny and rich and dirty and taut and original. I wanted it to be my biography, but there was way more warmth and invention in it than you could fit in a lifetime

Funny, sad, bewildering and painfully honest, it’s a must-read for all fans of Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine

Funny and true

What a beautifully written first novel. Joe Stretch has a way with words that is intensely captivating… Superb on adolescence, the Nineties, and more

A consistently amusing hymn to unfulfilled potential which grows more involving and poignant as it goes on

Jim is such a likeable character, unflinchingly recounting in all his worst failures and humiliations

A funny, wryly observed coming-of-age novel, it will strike a chord with anyone who grew up during the Noughties. It’s full of quirky period details and Jim is an engaging narrator