Unforgettable

The Dark Road follows the river-borne escape of fugitives from the one-child policy. An ill-matched couple’s flight along anarchic backwaters leads them into a raw, brutal, brilliantly depicted boom-time underworld

[Ma Jian’s] characterization is superb… A devastating critique of China’s oppressive communist regime

A writer of rare orgininality... All of Ma’s skill and playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile, ever-changing new world

One of China’s most prominent dissident voices addresses the bleak effects of the one-child policy in this striking novel, in which the brutality of social engineering is made graphically plain. Ma Jian’s work is banned in China; this unflinching portrait of one woman’s struggle against oppression makes it sadly easy to understand why

Ma’s work is a vital corrective and he writes here with insistent, focused anger

Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the last 30 years

Fearsome, strange, deeply thoughtful

With deceptively modest prose, Toibin presents the Virgin Mary's story as one of human loss rather than salvation. By doing so he gives us a Mary to identify with rather than venerate

Daring and very moving

The Testament of Mary, a novella of absences and silences achieves a shimmering power

Toibin's take on the most famous mother in history .. is all too believable

Finely written

Channels the memories of the Vorgin Mary into a subversive tour de force of economy and lascerating style

Stands out for its bold conception and blazingly brilliant execution

A miniature masterpiece

The miracles are real, bit unsettling and sinister; Toibin's writing can be stunning beautiful; another should-have from this year's Booker shortlist

Toibin's short, powerful book offers itself up as an additional gospel

A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction

Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis

This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique

Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth

A virtuoso piece of entertainment which hurtles satisfyingly towards its conclusion after delivering a startling, didn’t-see-that-coming sucker-punch of a twist.

Funny, moving and thought-provoking

The key to Harkaway’s writing is the incredibly textured depth and imaginative characterisation. It is one of those books whose character are so rich that by the climax, you feel like they’ve penetrated your reality and you want to keep them close, even after the book is over.

Original and exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work

Original, exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work.