'An alchemist who converts the basest materials into gold'

'There aren't many writers around who are as much fun as Larry McMurtry'

This is a snarly group picaresque, a black comedy in which Gatwick airport is like Kafka's Castle in reverse... stifling, hilarious and indelible

Warner navigates the comic, the philosophical and the socially acute like no other writer we have

Vigorous and uncannily convincing... Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

You don't have to have read The Sopranos to make sense of The Stars in the Bright Sky, or to be instantly hooked by it

Highly-crafted, often beautiful writing

Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

The author of The Sopranos catches up with the same cast of party-going wild girls, all beautifully imagined in pitch-perfect social satire

This entertaining comedy of manners

Warner's comic depictions of the multiple tensions that run through the group finds its masterstroke in the grotesquely deluded yet impossible to dislike Manda, who is a neat satirical cipher for modern celebrity-obsessed culture. Terrific

Warner puts these very flesh-and-blood girls into locations of almost J G Ballardish sterility, with sodium lamps, flyovers and neon-signed hotels, all described beautifully. The way he manages to inhabit his gang of girls with such gusto is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction

Pitch-perfect dialogue elevates this exhilarating, genuinely inspired novel into something that is, in Manda's phrase, 'dead brilliant'

Embedded in an unflinching portrayal or working-class femininity - all binge-drinking, chain-smoking, shrieking vulgarity and copious vomiting - is a brilliant anatomy of shifting group dynamics, many nods to Beckett's waiting games, and a sly engagement with Ballard's reading of airport space as the ultimate home of deracinated modernity

Warner is fascinated by the strange domesticity of 'non-places', and occasionally cranks up the alienation to describe their fixtures - literally, the light fixtures, room numbers and air-conditioning units - with a nouveau roman blankness... The most striking passages of the novel are in this clunky yet exoticising register, which inverts the technique of The Sopranos by making the warmth and fluency of the gang seem contained by the proprieties of adulthood. It brings with it a control-tower angle of vision that subtly distorts familiar language...

Beautifully imagined in a pitch-perfect social satire