Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift.

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent.

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity.

Easily one of the best novels (or is it actually a memoir?) that will be published this year... It is touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you.

A more loving and moving tribute to its subject is hard to imagine.

One of my favorite contemporary novelists... The Hero of This Book is funny, it’s sharp, the sentences are beautiful.

Her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down... With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.

The question of what this work is - a novel or a memoir, a fiction or a fact - can’t be answered. Doesn’t matter. The Hero of This Book is tender, funny, heartbreaking, philosophical. Elizabeth McCracken is a writer who always delights, and this is an exhilarating book.

This story is a tribute to how great writing can elevate any subject.

McCracken is such a witty writer, full of sharp observations about life, writing, relationships and the people she meets.

How reassuring it is to have writers like Elizabeth McCracken among us... One of those fleet-footed writers who will never be trapped, or even reliably tracked, by aboutness... Her speciality is the interior, and the interior is vast. We must bring our own compasses, emotional and aesthetic.

A soulful, searching portrait.

Teases out her McCracken's strengths: a domestic tale about family life in all its weirdness and warmth.

Light of touch, witty... Raises all kinds of chewy questions about truth, fiction and where to draw the boundaries of the imagination, both in life and prose... Deeply moving.

An accounting of the self that refuses autobiography, a travelogue about being lost, a novel that is really a theory of fiction, an elegy that sidesteps solemnity: The Hero of This Book brilliantly disarms our usual modes of thinking. Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers, fascinating, inventive, and profound.

McCracken's novels awe me endlessly. I read this wondering how she was managing to make me laugh and cry at the same time.

Told with McCracken's trademark self-deprecating wit, the "hero" of the book comes alive in this tribute.

A life-affirming novel about death which finds humour in the difficulties that await us all, joy and poignancy in the everyday.

This slender book is a powerful tribute to its author's 'hero': her clever, undaunted mother.

I absolutely loved it. A moving portrayal of daughterhood, achingly precise on memory and grief, and suffused with warmth and love.

Wonderful... Through The Hero of This Book, McCracken extends her mother's heaven to our memories. I'll be thinking about her with great affection for a very long time.

Gorgeous... Not a word is wasted.

There is a welcome levity to his prose here as he riffs on myth-making, culture clashes or the nature of storytelling itself.

Victory City has the tone of mischief Rushdie is always able to channel into his bright, fluid storytelling. Amid all the courtly intrigue and fantastic realism woven through the extensive cast of characters, fleeting dashes of wicked humour sit up and pierce the tale delectably. Rushdie's sharp, camouflaged satire speaks to everything, from religious extremism to greed to patriarchal misogyny. It all just seems to unspool from him without effort.

The best thing Salman Rushdie has written in years... One of the richest and most exuberant books he has given us.

Rushdie's creation is vivid, compelling, and entirely his own.

Salman Rushdie is a genius and I wish he could read me a story - or a chapter of his book - every night before bed. The scale and scope of his intellect and his imagination is googolplex.

It does not resemble any other novel I could name. A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers.

No one, and I mean no one, can bring an entire world to life... like Salman Rushdie.

Mesmerising and soul-stirring. Victory City is an epic tribute to the power of words as well as the resilience of women. Rushdie is without a peer in proving that literature soars above tyranny and bigotry, and imagination roars louder than censorship

This is Salman Rushdie at his most virtuosic.

It will show you the adult world in a whole new light. Only a master storyteller can do that.

A storyteller who reminds that death may take away a lot of things, but never the power of our words.

A capacious and sweeping telling in which writing about the past is a way of also staring dead on at the present.

Victory City stands out as one of the year's literary highlights... that feels like an instant classic.

Rushdie is an assured storyteller at the height of his powers, revealing once again how important India is as a fount of his imagination.

Victory City is one of Rushdie's very best novels. It is also a luminous, italicised, vibrant reminder of the possibilities of free expression and of the untrammelled imagination. In this instance, the medium is indeed the message.

Victory City can, in many ways, be read as an entertaining jaunt through Indian history, though it is history through the kaleidoscopic and sweeping lens of a fairy tale... this brilliantly magical tale.

This sweeping, intricately crafted fairy tale is underscored by very human characters and Rushdie's signature wit.

A grand entertainment, in a tale with many strands, by an ascended master of modern legends.

Rushdie's magical style unfurls wonders.

Rushdie's Victory City is another fabulous novel set in his native India... He's a master who never forgets that the main goal of a storyteller is to entertain rather than educate or pontificate.

Rushdie is, above all else...one of the most powerful defenders of story we have... Victory City is a victory for Rushdie - and for every reader who enters its gates.

Rushdie succeeds in creating a kind of incantatory prose that befits the fabulist nature of the story... he can enchant readers like few other writers.

This is a man at his full-strength, high-tar best - with his deeply humane worldview, his brilliance at set-pieces and, above all, the thrilling wildness of his imagination on irresistible display.

With its carousel of shifting politics and history, Victory City is Rushdie's most textured and triumphant wonder tale yet.

Utterly enchanting.

Rushdie's return to magic, myth, and India's ancient stories is dazzling. With mercurial prose and vivid renderings, Rushdie never loses us in Victory City's convolutions, but instead builds our trust to travail the many grand events of Pampa's imagined empire.

A rich, dramatic saga... The many moments of comedy...show Salman Rushdie's storytelling skills and his endearing sense of playfulness... the main feeling the reader gets is of a storyteller enjoying himself.

Rushdie is an expert at mixology; he's the DJ Shadow of text with references and allusions to high and low culture from Finnegans Wake to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon... a well-told tale that gets bums on seats.

There's a magical thread of storytelling running through the veins of each character we meet in this book... a joy to read.

A work of great imagination... In Victory City the power of the written word and of the storyteller remain triumphant.

Rushdie’s sheer love of fiction is irrepressible.

A wonderfully entertaining literary hybrid

Victory City is Salman Rushdie at his imaginative best… sweeping the reader on a journey that feels epic in a mere 320 pages