Wickedly good

Her brilliance in capturing the ripples on the surface of family life gives her a claim to be the Jane Austen of our age

Anne Tyler is inventive, funny and wise. Her fiction is magically alive to the quirks and coincidences of fate

Funny and lyrical and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design...rich...warm. The writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good

Miss Tyler never loses her control. She writes with virtuosity and perfect confidence, insight and compassion

The book’s interest comes almost entirely from its strangeness – its world continues to be charmingly, earnestly weird.

He is a proven master with an increasingly wilful streak, always a writer to excite, while for a reader with a fondness for backing a good horse, here it is. While it is always dangerous to push an as yet unpublished work, but in the case of Coetzee, this could be a book of the year, never mind an expected contender.

[It is] surprisingly involving...richly suggestive.

Freed from literary convention, Mr Coetzee writes not to provide answers, but to ask great questions.

[A] tenaciously absorbing sequel.

It’s a subtly different project from the strenuous fictions that won Coetzee his Nobel and two Man Booker prizes: still intense but, by his standards, a bit rambling yet oddly focused. Perhaps what we’re seeing is Coetzee having fun. There are certainly times in the novel...when I pictured the ghost of a smile behind the page.

[A] captivating tale.

It will keep you philosophically and morally on the edge of your seat throughout.

[It] is pleasingly baffling, suggesting hidden depths and multiple layers without ever quite revealing them.

What stands out, and stays with you, is the fable-like aura which makes this feel like a children’s book for adults.

Coetzee doesn’t want to be understood, or explained. He wants, merely, to be read. The Schooldays of Jesus is, indeed, very readable.

The prose is limpid, the plot simple, the style hypnotic, but what it all means I wouldn’t like to say.

The best poetry out since Warsan Shire.

A fast-paces, dense, poetic, original and bewitching story by an important new writer. That Reminds Me will long be remembered by readers.

Deserves the same recognition that greeted Max Porter's similarly constructed fictionalised memoir Grief is the Thing With Feathers... uses its broken-up style to explore experiences that defy easy comprehension. There is nothing indulgent about this quietly observed account of a black man Owusu gives the name of K... There is a physicality to his writing, the impression of incoherent feelings being wrestled into shape, that lends his book heft. K's future is, in the end, ambiguous, but Owusu's surely gleams bright.

A bold prose poem written in novella form, That Reminds Me is one of the most powerful pieces of writing to be published in 2019.

The latest release from Stormzy's increasingly impressive #Merky imprint, this is a stylistically ambitious memoir of a precarious Tottenham upbringing. Owusu writes with a poet's gift for seemingly incidental observation in a potent story that's left deliberately, troublingly fragmented.

A virtuosic debut by a raw new talent. An honest and timely evaluation of a black man's struggle to belong and later come to terms with failing mental health. Utterly convincing and deeply sad, Owusu's storytelling will bring readers to tears.

Derek Owusu is not just a brilliant writer, he’s a deep thinker. Anything he does is relevant, and meaningful. It would be easy to say that he is mainly concerned with the condition of young black men, but in truth he speaks truth to all of us.

A magnificent achievement.

Written with candour and verve, and full of moments of heart-stopping anguish and beauty.