[Holleran's] new novel is all the more affecting and engaging because the images of isolation and old age here are haunted . . . in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about gay abandon, the sheer, careless pleasure of it: Dancer From the Dance. Now, at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time

Bracingly honest and wise... A beautiful way to describe how we fade away.

Holleran's fifth novel - both melancholy and hilarious - finds the protagonist living out his days in his late mother's Florida home, navigating loneliness, a changing world and a life post-cruising. The book's image of isolation and old age is all the more haunting because in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about the sheer, careless pleasure of gay abandon, Dancer From the Dance.

[With] grim wit and flashes of sanctity from above... Holleran's writing is as calmly compelling as the repetitive tasks that occupy a monastic day.

Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age... A wistful, witty meditation on a gay man's twilight years and the twilight of America.

Both melancholy and hilarious... Haunting.

An unexpectedly timely novel - wise, shrewd, and in its way, kind, if honesty is ever kind. And written with the sure hand of a master.

Every one of [Andrew Holleran's] books is a gem. If he were straight, his reputation would be immense. The beauty of his language, the empathy for his characters and the world he writes about, are unsurpassed by any other gay writing of our time... He is our Fitzgerald and Hemingway but for one thing: he writes better than both of them.

Andrew Holleran writes about desire so beautifully it's occasionally forgotten that he's one of the best living novelists on friendship. This tender, often very funny novel is a book about that final field of play between friends, when all the masks are removed. I wish it never ended.

Accomplished . . . Holleran is, as always, sharply observant when it comes to human relationships . . . The writing throughout exhibits the same clinical brilliance that Holleran made his own in his rightly acclaimed first novel, Dancer from the Dance, fifty years ago. His prose remains unnervingly precise in every detail. It is also wryly comic.

A powerful meditation on friendship and mortality... Majestic... This vital work shows Holleran at the top of his game.

After sixteen years without a new Holleran novel, this is a welcome surprise, and I look forward to sitting in the sun in the verdant outdoors with this book of loss and loneliness.

Very funny, melancholic... Holleran's prose has the effect of a vast, polluted sunset. His book left me with a sense of peace and yearning.

Beautifully told and gripping from first page to last

A really engaging novel about grief and whether or not anyone can be held accountable for the deeds of those they love

Ian McEwan has always been a generous writer to his readers, his novels bulging with big ideas and rich story-telling… [it’s] hard not to admire the sheer scale of McEwan’s ambition. Many literary novels claim to be exploring ‘what it is to be human’. Few carry out this exploration as thoroughly, or as literally, as [Machines Like Me] does.

McEwan teases out the ethical dilemmas of this storyline with his customary verve… [Machines Like Me is] effortlessly readable and fizzing with ideas.

McEwan returns with another ambitious, high-concept work... [exploring] some very timely moral dilemmas.

Adam, an eerily ambiguous presence throughout, proves a highly effective conduit for McEwan to channel all sorts of interesting questions concerning sexual consent, the burden of knowledge, the collapse of the borders between public and private and whether humans or machines are better equipped to behave ethically.

Machines Like Me is ultimately about the age-old question of what makes people human. The reader is left baffled and beguiled.

McEwan gives the whole subject of artificial intelligence a thorough and fascinating examination… a rich and thought-provoking read.

Gripping.

In [Machines Like Me], McEwan has taken his creativity into a subversive alternative 1980s London… the young couple at the centre of McEwan’s story find out the danger in inventing things beyond our control.

Machines Like Me feels like a novel about empathy, and the artificial limits we set on it – by race, by gender, by geographical location – so that we can sleep at night in a world of cruelty and horror.

Machines Like Me is deeply intriguing, a little unnerving and quite captivating… [it] will leave you questioning, and imagining how our not too distant future might look.

Ian McEwan is one of our most venerated living writers… [in Machines Like Me] McEwan shrewdly touches upon the intricacies of artificial intelligence.

McEwan’s prose is, as expected, nuanced, thoughtful and beguiling.

It wasn’t going to be long before [McEwan] swooped upon the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence… Wonderful… [McEwan] pose[s] all sorts of questions about humanity.

Machines Like Me is elegantly constructed, the sentences are consistently lovely, and the character dynamics…compelling.

McEwan knows how to fashion a twisty and pacy narrative, to keep us alive to the possibility that what we’re reading…is not all that it seems.

McEwan muses on love, empathy and the morality and ethics of artificial intelligence… very good.

An important literary contribution to the AI debate, one of the great questions of our time.

Precisely rendered and well observed… [McEwan] neatly delineates humanity’s remorseless self-demotion from the centre of the universe to flotsam.

[An] undeniably another excellent novel from McEwan, who demonstrates that he can conjure up challenging characters, witty dialogue and moral ambiguity when dealing with sex robots just as brilliantly as he does on literary turf.

Dexterous, utterly gripping and intensely thought-provoking.

Deeply unnerving… What starts out as a darkly funny ménage à trois becomes an unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever.

The latest novel from my favourite author tackles the subjects of artificial intelligence and what it is to be human. He does this in a surprising, original way, and Adam, the strong, seductive “robot”, is a character that will haunt me for a long time.

[This] new, gripping, beautifully written and constructed, disturbing, and provocative novel…is a thrilling read… the chilling conclusions that hyper-rationalism can come to are brilliantly described.

McEwan maintains his status as a master of fiction.

A new collection of stories that explores the complex - and often darkly funny - connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

Ian McEwan’s sublimely playful new novel transports you back to the Eighties but with some major changes, including eerily life-like robots… Dark and slyly funny, it’ll also give your brain a workout.

Not only does he pull it off, he does so triumphantly, in the cleverest book I’ve read this year. It’s smart, dark and at times very funny.

A saucy, claustrophobic and darkly funny story which is all rather peculiar. Compulsive reading.

I devoured Ian McEwan’s latest very funny spin on Hamlet.

An ingenious rewrite of Hamlet as a murder story in which a foetus is detective and possible victim.

This is McEwan at his most playfully provocative.

A clever conceit, elegantly wrought, economically constructed.

A bewitching ode to humanity’s beauty, longing and selfishness.

A gripping piece of fiction.

I was hooked from the first page.

[A] smart, eloquent novel.

A enthralling read from one of the world’s master storytellers.

McEwan delights with lyrical prose that is fittingly poetic.

[A] work which both fascinates and disturbs through its unique perspective on a malicious death… Every sentence is a joy to behold, a gift to the reader of delicately considered prose, and thoughtful observations… Alongside its edgy and entertaining narration, and perhaps in part because of it, the novel manages to challenge all preconceptions of the crime genre, upending the whodunit into an extraordinary will-they-do-it… By nature, Nutshell is a novel which perplexes, entertains, and moves the reader in equal turn, all with McEwan’s startling attention to detail, and luxuriant prose style. Read it for its peculiar narrator, read it for the rapidly-changing and intense emotions, or read it just for the thrill of chase as the killing comes to fruition; whatever intrigues you about this novel, just make sure that you do read it – and feel the thrill for yourself.

Brilliantly realised… Any book so bound up in a conceit and in its own verbal fireworks at times runs the risk of being a bit clever-clever. But on the whole we accept in a suspension of disbelief the foetus’s pompous mastery of language and imagery and abandon ourselves to the sheer eloquent pleasure of this hilarious romp.

Short, odd but pleasurable… Great fun, and very well written.

Rich in Shakespearean allusion, this is McEwan on dazzling form.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

Ian McEwan’s brilliance as a stylist and surprise plotter finds a fitting subject in Nutshell…, which is Hamlet as told from inside the womb. Up there with his best.

A gripping tale is told with breathtaking skill, turbocharged with rage against the madness and despair of our modern world.

Nutshell is one of those books you sit down to read and don’t get up until you’ve finished. It is brilliantly executed and full of surprises; original, clever and witty. Simply a must-read

A book I couldn’t put down… brilliantly clever