An enchanting tale inspired by Mozart's childhood concerts that reads like a sketch for a full-length novel

This fresh, powerful first novel turns the lives of Hattie's children into an epic of America in the 20th century. Tough, truthful, wonderfully controlled writing.

Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own - both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters' minds and hearts.

A vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer's judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity.

Beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love. A treasure of a novel.

I can't remember when I read anything that moved me quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.

This is a bold debut that sets out to address the huge themes of motherhood and US history through the tale of one dysfunctional family, and succeeds.

The opening chapter is a cracker, exquisitely written, full of vividly evoked tension and searing emotion. It is painful - relentlessly so - with a devastating coup de grace.

An unexpectedly uplifting reminder of the resilience of the human spirit.

As unremittingly bleak as her characters' lives are, Mathis has not produced a grim novel: it is as much about our need for joy as it is about our struggles against bitterness. Written with elegance and remarkable poise ... memorable and with the hint of something formidable glinting under the surface.

This is an impressive debut: tender, tough and unflinching.

This rich debut couldn't be further from the straightforward 20th-century American family saga it appears at first to be . . . Spanning many decades, it is an intricate portrait not only of complex family ties, but also of one quietly strong woman who heads this complicated tribe of siblings, children and friends. With each chapter narrated by one of Hattie's children, the power of Brooklyn author Ayana Mathis' novel is in its ability to create distinctive yet precise characters brimming with recognisable humanity.

Dazzling… Royle attended last year’s Man Booker Prize ceremony as editor of one of the shortlisted titles, Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse… I wouldn’t bet against Royle having to dry-clean the tux on his own account next time.

Royle’s coup is to deliver the pithy sting of a good short story many times over the course of a whole novel.

I admired it so much and wanted to go back and see how it was all put together. His book absolutely enchanted me.

This may be a tricksily metafictional novel but Royle hasn’t forgotten his readers.

5 stars, gripping, innovative and fluent.

Nicholas Royle has produced the holy grail: a literary page-turner. Although it’s published in January, I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make the short list of many a prize at the end of the year.

A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

A vertiginous murder mystery with echoes of JG Ballard, David Lodge and Alain Robbe-Grillet

If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle's skills put himself in charge of the banquet

A brilliant, eerie mix of campus meta-novel, whodunnit, failed-love story and existential contemplation

This just might be the exceptional book which should be judged by its cover

An ingenious tale

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original