Enthralling and powerful

This is a confident and poignant novel and succeeds in animating a set of people rarely seen in literary fiction

A rare and remarkable achievement

Destined to be a classic

The Sound of One Hand Clapping achieves the difficult task of making clear and real the lives of those who normally stay hidden in history. From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story

A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling... It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once, and ultimately achieves a kind of spirit-healing few novels do

Richly imagined...told in a voice rarely heard in Australia: almost violently masculine, shot through with heartbreaking delicacy of feeling

This is a bold, cinematic novel... Parts of it are terrifically funny.

A genuinely stirring love story.

Her flair for describing feelings and relationships makes this an engaging window into the messy minds of Londoners and her commentary on the city rings true.

Determinedly and impressively intellectual… A novel of ideas that is deft enough never to be didactic because it asks more question than it answers.

This is an author with a proven ability to see – truly see – and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page.

[Like] Sleepless in Seattle, respun by James Joyce, and set within a London on the precipice of Brexit.

Her best book in years.

Uniquely moving love story.

Kennedy is never less than illuminating.

[Kennedy is] witty, sharp, almost too intelligent and a bit provocative.

An uplifting tale of the triumph of niceness over nastiness.

A writer of exquisite precision… A public novel, angrily political… Expressing her idea of a writer’s social responsibility so eloquently… Well-suited to Kennedy’s talent and her characteristically oblique and original way of seeing the world.

What sets this novel apart is Kennedy’s physical and emotional sensitivity to both solitude and tenderness.

Absorbing… Serious without being solemn, sweet without being sickly, it’s an elegant tale about the unexpected places where kindness and sympathy can flourish and deepen.

Kennedy’s comedy is ruthlessly observed – an anti-romance that warms into something moving and profound. It’s also a brilliant portrait of city living.

Two lonely people go about their day in London in this typically Kennedian and utterly wonderful novel… but they find their way towards each other in an agonising love story that’s all about morality and decency in a careless world… Kennedy is a stand-up comedian, and observational comedy runs through this novel in interior monologues that are heartbreakingly familiar and laugh-out-loud sad. Her sentences are some of the best in modern fiction (there’s a springer spaniel called Hector with “black, bewildered ears… [that] made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.”) and reading her prose is like eating those fizzy sweets that are both sweet and sour make you wince at the back of your mouth – then go back for more… It’s gorgeous.

Consistently raw and powerful… emotionally exhausting… But there’s a lot to be said for a novel which sets so much store by “affection and tenderness”, and in which the emotional peaks and the possibilities of redemption and renewal are marked by the simple holding of hands.

I love, love, love the Rushdie – I think it’s my favourite of his… The fantasy elements are just magical and, of course, it’s gorgeously written.

An apocalyptic battle between reason and unreason, good and evil, light and darkness, with all the bells and whistles of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Not only a beautifully written satire-as-fairytale but the subject matter is bang on trend… That Rushdie should still be writing so potently and still be continuing to push back the frontiers, when he could easily pull up a deck chair and languish on the frontiers he already owns is wonderful, inspirational and profoundly (but only in the best way) terrifying… 10/10, Master.

Ambitious, smart and dark fable that is full of rich and profound notions about human nature.

I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness, humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.