The Evening Road is a vivid, disturbing book, able to subvert itself in half a line, constantly challenging the reader’s expectations. Its ghost map is quickly established in the reader’s head, and as the characters fade into the margin of the final page, it is as if an inner landscape has altered. It is mature, accomplished, impressive.

A strange, dazzling novel, as audacious as it is lyrical, that hauls up insight, sorrow, and even – somehow – wit from the well of American history.

Hunt is an irresistibly inventive writer, slipping easily from crackling dialogue to dreamy lyricism… The Evening Road is a novel of depth and beauty, a meditation on history that speaks eloquently to the present, a book that sidles up behind you until you can feel its hot breath on the back of your neck.

A story told from three viewpoints about the banality of evil, and what ordinary people must accept for that evil to prosper… One of the finest novels so far this year

An astute investigation into the nature of evildoing

In this startling and unforgettable novel, the characters explode off the page like fireworks on a very dark and disturbing night. Days later I’m still thinking about them, still hearing the cadence of Hunt’s poetic language, and still wondering which is more enduring, the darkness or the light.

Wow! Beautifully crafted, seductive, evocative language and a story that punches you in the gut and lays you low and yet leaves you wanting more. It’s rich, deep, dark, harrowing stuff and it does what all great fiction does – it lays ahold of the heart and won’t let go. You’ll think about this book for weeks, if not years, to come.

Engrossing...intriguing... Hunt finds history or the big events useful framing devices, but he is more interested in how words can do justice to single players and life's fraught moments... He is strange, challenging, and a joy to read.

[An] excellent, dreamlike novel.

Arresting and disturbing… a haunting novel packed with vivid scenes and memorable characters

This darkly absurd history trucks freely with the fantastic - the city's airport is built in less than a week - but many of the more brazen events are taken straight from the news... Yan Lianke's burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution

Yan Lianke paints a metaphoric and absurd portrait of contemporary China so obsessed with growth that its moral values have been left by the wayside. Yan Lianke’s poetic prose rewards those who read to the end of this great novel of rare insight

An epic page-turner... Yan's mesmerizing ability to pull readers into this raw, subversive, not completely fictional world will continue to build his international audience. Mo Yan was the first Chinese national to be awarded the Nobel for Literature; Yan might just be next

Yan returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and ‘contemporary China's incomprehensible absurdity.’...[The Explosion Chronicles] has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Dürrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness. Indeed, his satire is careful and crafty ... it can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire... Brilliant

This novel is a thoroughly fantastical satire where absurdity reflects the profound truth... Beautiful and strongly poetic

[Yan Lianke] manipulates irony, absurdity, and the fantastical with ease

This is an epic tale of miracles, madness, greed and corruption set against the backdrop of runaway urbanisation… Explosion is not as unrelentingly dark as The Four Books, but it may be even more politically daring…. In Explosion brightly hued roses may bloom out of season when something good happens, but the vision is closer to a nightmare. Even the most majestic of sights in this novel are distractions designed to mask the pervasive moral rot that lies just beneath the surface

An extraordinary insight into modern China

Daring and often hilarious

Brimming with absurdity, intelligence and wit, The Explosion Chronicles considers the high stakes of passion and power, the consequences of corruption and greed, the dynamics of love and hate, as well as the seemingly boundless excesses of capitalist culture.

A blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess

The sweeping mythic style and cartoon-like effects are exhilarating, and...the realities of life in China are sharply conveyed

A compelling story, finely written and forensic in its search for truth... This account of one family's tragedy is a haunting story that lingers long in the memory

An example of masterful storytelling

With each novel Ryan gets better, and this moving and quietly insistent work is his best yet.

You can sense his compassion in the bones of his work

Devastating and masterful

A hugely affecting, moving read. I was heartbroken by the end, but adored every chapter

Beautiful

Each section displays Ryan’s range as a writer... [he] writes with brilliant empathy.

Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose.

Heartbreaking … Arguably the best of the new wave of Irish writers to have emerged over the last decade

Ryan has the gift of ventriloquism - he inhabits his fictional creations thoroughly, enveloping you in their worlds

Sublime

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan made me laugh and cry and forced me to look strangers in the eye

Beautifully bleak and characterised by his remarkable ability to write about grief and common humanities.

Beautiful, compassionate

Superlatives wouldn’t do for describing From a Low and Quiet Sea … understated, and gloriously heart rendering

Strout turns her clear, incisive gaze on the intricacies and betrayals of small town life

Anything is Possible is predictably great because it's written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable - because it is written by Elizabeth Strout