An astonishing novel: ambitious, pithy, beautifully written and - above all - brave enough to tackle the great, public issues of our century without pity, prurience or maudlin sentiment

A potent and ambitious fiction, a joy to read, and perhaps its authors best work to date

Phillips is a cool stylist whose intricately structured work builds with a slow-burning, emotional power, and here is some of his finest writing to date

An extraordinarily perceptive and intelligent novel, and a haunting one

Ambitious and difficult with multi-layered prose that will work its way into your very soul

A genre-smashing novel

It grips the reader from the outset, and as it is read, layer upon layer of psychological and intertextual meaning can be unpicked and analyzed. It is certainly an immensely powerful contribution to both fairy-tale and fantasy genres

Brave and bold

This is an astonishing and beautifully written novel with very strong cross-over appeal

To condemn it as merely wilful taboo-breaking is to miss the humanity in what is one of the strangest and most moving works of children's literature I have read in years . . . Look beyond the shocking scenes and this is a novel that explores the most profound human emotions with a clear gaze; it made me weep like a child at the end

Enthralling, at times unsettling but always richly imagined

This is a multi-layered novel which requires and deserves attentive reading, regardless of the reader's age; it is unlikely, though, to have much appeal for the censorious adult or for anyone under 16

Edric succeeds in painting an atmospheric dystopia that is at once unsettling and frightening and laudable for its skilful evocation of the doom and the despair