Gripping, affecting, surprising. I inhaled it.

Spectacular . . . Dark, beautiful, at once grittily real and wildly magical. Insanely alluring.

Blew me away with its power, anger and wit.

A big and rambunctious novel that casts a cold satirical eye on themes such as language, culture, identity, sectarianism, and the terrifying proximity of the past

Shimmering with wit, simmering with an incandescent rage, shot through with a seam of wild magic, The Fire Starters is a powerful, disturbing portrait of East Belfast and its people and its hope for the future. I won’t be the only reader to proclaim that, in the best way possible, Jan Carson is on fire.

Captivating, intelligent and courageous

Carson's playfulness delights again and again, even as she explores her city's darkest corners. Sound the siren: this novel truly burns bright

Jan Carson seems to have invented a new Belfast in this gripping, surprising, exhilarating novel.

With her idiosyncratic blend of warm intelligence, dark humour, and magic realism, Jan Carson brings us a singular portrait of a city and its people struggling with questions of guilt, responsibility, and the limits of love.

A perfect mix of dark humour, magic and social commentary.

A brilliant, wry novel, fizzing with energy

With a caustic wit and lyrical prose style, The Fire Starters is a rumination on fatherhood, identity, culture and place ... it marks out Carson as one of the most exciting and original Northern Irish writers of her generation

Irresistible, vivid and gripping

Both a fiercely gripping thriller and a beautifully twisted fable, The Fire Starters is an electrifying blast of Belfast Gothic: a luminous, furious vision of a city at war with itself.

Wow. Hypnotic, alluring, perfectly vivid.

Breathtaking ... The best book I read this year

Characteristically inventive, Carson throws into fresh relief the complexities of familial relationships

A playful study of fatherhood and the still-flickering flames of the conflict in Northern Ireland . . . hugely and pleasingly reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s fabulist take on the partition of India, Midnight’s Children.

Unusual, mystical and so sublimely written, I read it in a single sitting

One of 2019's top reads

The writing here is incredible - a breath-taking novel

Spectacular... Dark, beautiful, at once grittily real and wildly magical, insanely alluring - a siren-song of a novel.

Apollo 13-meets-Robinson-Crusoe-on-Mars, and I guess for those who enjoyed the films Gravity or Moon, this one will be a literary equivalent ... I was, in the end, totally won over by this book in its celebration of how humans can deal with anything the harshness of science and extreme environments can pose, and it kept me reading longer than I meant to

one of the most thrilling and absorbing novels I have ever read

Riveting...a tightly constructed and completely believable story of a man's ingenuity and strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Weir combines the heart-stopping with the humorous in this brilliant debut novel... the perfect mix of action and space adventure.

An exciting, insightful science- based tale [that] kept me turning the pages to see what ingenious solution our hero would concoct to survive yet anotherimpossible dilemma

A potent brew of fame, sexual power, hypocrisy and bad men.

A powerful novel.

Actress is a fabric of musings… The characters in Enright’s novels are absorbing because they seem recognisable in an unassuming way: they’re as lovely, boring and complex as the people outside the books.

Enright, herself a former actress, captures all the comedy and pathos that comes from living the strange, unreal life of an actor.

A raw, tender portrayal of a woman undone by her work, and the men who control it. Seamlessly wrought, it is quite bewitching.

Actress is a poignant tale of the vicissitudes of fame and its effects on the loved ones of the famous.

Compelling.

The next stage in an illustrious writing career… stuffed full of dark wit, memorable lines and striking images.

Enright is to Dublin as Didion is to California.

I've just started reading Anne Enright's Actress. I very much enjoyed her previous novel, The Green Road. This one has glorious lines even in the opening pages.

I would definitely recommend Actress by Anne Enright, it is her at her very best.

Few reviews said how absolutely hilarious [Actress] is. Enright skewers beautifully those creepy provincial aesthetes of Dublin of the sixties and seventies.

Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness. Here she conjures [a] rollicking story.

A rich, impressively imagined work about a stage and screen star who may never have existed but seems considerably more human than many real-life figures as seen through their own eyes or those of any but the finest biographers.

This story is about mothers and daughters, but also secrets in families and women in Ireland. It's an easy read, with a quintessentially Irish tone... It's brilliant.

Anne Enright's brilliant novel is a darkly glittering account of the cost to both the mother and her daughter of Katherine's complicated fame.

A gem from a former Booker winner.

Anne Enright['s]...writing is simply glorious. Comedy and tragedy in one.