Sapphire never flinches from the truth

Captures the gruelling heartbreak of trying to love anything when the world doesn't love you enough

Prepare to be harrowed; I was sobbing by the end of the first chapter . . . [Sapphire] writes with a burning anger that gives this novel an explosive power

Sapphire is not your average writer. Brave, bold and uncompromising . . . The breathtaking velocity and visceral power of her prose soars off the page . . . The novel keeps you on tenterhooks

Explicit and damning in its depiction of a forgotten underclass . . . Stunning . . . Exhilarating

A dark and punishing tale

The Kid is deeply moving

Harrowing . . . Masterfully narrated . . . Powerful

Abdul's story is frighteningly realistic . . . The novel itself is a consummate work of art, style and brains, shining at times with the possibility for hope and joy . . . More accomplished than [Push] and a thousand times more frightening

Painstakingly beautiful

A moving, funny, richly drawn story of a young man's attempts to find out who he wants to be when there are so many others who know best. Full of real pleasures and unexpected wisdom, this book sweeps you along

A beautiful, bittersweet novel

Written with wisdom and deliciously subtle wit, in the tradition of Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Francesca Segal has a remarkable ability to bring characters vividly to life who are at once warm, funny, complex, and utterly recognizable. This is a wonderfully readable novel: elegant, accomplished and romantic

An elegant little novel and a real delight to read... an updated version of the 1920 Pulitzer-prize-winning The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - the parallels are close, but given how deeply anti-Semitic the New York social elite was in that period, transplanting the story to a Jewish community is not only clever, it also gives a wider, more general point of reference, in quite a subtle way

·A mature love story that meditates on community and ties that bind…a contemporary recasting of that adroit classic, The Age of Innocence…Just like Old New York, this is a community that has its own way of doing things, and The Innocents takes its cue from Wharton’s anthropological musings, doubling as a primer on the importance of the Friday night dinner, the symbolism of the Rosh Hashanah, and the evolution of the Christmakah party…Segal…is a writer of instinctive warmth who can divertingly lavish a full page on a breakfast spread, yet she never loses sight of this haunted truth’

The Innocents has garnered her a next-Zadie-Smith style buzz.

Segal writes with delicacy, accumulating details that create the texture of Adam and Rachel’s world… Adam is well drawn and not unsympathetic, and Segal has skillfully created a cast of secondary characters, including Ziva, a survivor of the Holocaust.

It takes chutzpah to appropriate such a well-loved classic but Segal parallels the two convention-bound worlds with aplomb… [a] classily composed comedy of manners

Impresive debut…a poised text

Wittily observant

Hugely enjoyable first novel... The end result falls somewhere between Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad (about a matriarchal Jewish rabbi) and David Nicholl's One Day (with its theme of mismatched love) and is all the more pleasing for that

Elegant little novel and a real delight to read

It's an old saying that you choose your friends but not your family and the family reunion has been well-used in literature, but Haddon breathes new life into it. He's never shied away from the difficult subjects and he deals sensitively with a child's burgeoning homosexuality but his real skill, his genius is in his understanding of mental problems, that disassociation between the mind and the brain. It's a book which is so right in every small detail but a gem when taken altogether.

The book gave me the ever-changing, fascinating and the feeling that I was looking through a looking glass. The eight of them have their own secrets, longings and resentments which only make them as human as you and I. The writing zips in montages and sometimes it becomes difficult to figure who is carrying the baton, though once you get used to the writing, it isn’t difficult to figure. The language and symbolism is weaved very well for a story of a dysfunctional family. In some parts, it almost reminded me of Faulkner’s, “The Sound and the Fury”. The Red House by Mark Haddon is a rollercoaster of emotions and all it works surprisingly well and all adds up at the end of the book. I would definitely and most certainly recommend this read for the long summer weekend that comes up.

Haddon can marry extraordinary perception with uncluttered language... He also burrows into the minds of his protagonists with astute precision

It looks like Mark Haddon is about to have a great big success all over again

Brilliantly readable… Comic and bittersweet

A closely observed domestic drama…

Characteristically original, deftly observed...

A beautifully orchestrated novel that gently questions how we define success

[Haddon] shows a knack for portraying family dynamics…

Mark Haddon proves himself a master of the domestic drama

Gripping drama

With its slightly skewed perspective and the relative freshness of its approach, HHhH compels us once again to consider that this, surely, was humanity's lowest point: a war waged, not against those who thwarted Germany's territorial ambitions, but against all that was good and decent in the human soul. In so doing, it confounds those who would decry post-modernism as wilfully obscure, relativistic and lacking in conviction

French newcomer Laurent Binet hits the ground running in the engrossing novel within a novel

A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance

This book fully justifies the lavish praise adorning its author

Dazzling... It's stunningly brilliant

Stunning

Binet provides both context and impressive detail on the eventual assassination of Heydrich