Praise for Clarkson:

Brilliant...laugh-out-loud

Outrageously funny...will have you in stitches

Very funny...I cracked up laughing on the tube

Perhaps you wouldn't expect your next great read to be a sort of comic opera set in a Brooklyn housing project circa 1969 starring a drink-addled church deacon named Sportcoat, his best friend Hot Sausage and a melancholic amateur gardener with mafia ties known as the Elephant. Best put on your seat belt, because McBride (The Good Lord Bird, Five-Carat Soul) will take you on a fast, funny, farcical ride.

McBride is operating in the realm of social allegory, a lineage that extends back through generations of writers: Ralph Ellison, Terry Southern, Darius James. Like them, he telegraphs his intentions through the use — or better yet, the reinvention — of history, which as Deacon King Kong progresses becomes a kind of floating opera, touching but not always overlapping with events as they occurred.

Deacon King Kong cements McBride as a master storyteller.

Dazzling, spiritually rich.

Peopled with wondrously quirky and charismatic individuals...both hilarious and affecting, the patter a treat, and in wise, drunk, old Sportcoat James McBride has given us a character for the ages.

A riotous burst of a novel that scrutinises the nature of fiction with the lightest of touches.

The novel’s 200 pages detail the protagonists’ twining internal existences over the course of a farcical 20-minute house-viewing during which they feel they might each have come to experience some form of self-knowledge, or higher knowledge … There aren’t many British writers who have Barker’s sort of courage – to get started on ideas that might appear like trifles, handle them seriously, and produce works that are as close as literature gets to pure play.

I Am Sovereign is bursting with energy, compassion and humour.

Barker is a writer in a class of her own ... A work of coruscating intelligence, of deep humanity.

Barker’s writing is very, very funny, both ha ha and strange ... Fans of Ali Smith’s 'Seasonal Quartet' will enjoy a similarly arch, detached view on the banality of contemporary Britain ... A gloriously audacious blend of, well, the deep and the trite.

Nicola Barker has repeatedly challenged convention. And she is not stopping now.

Ingenious ... Barker spins a series of variations on the theme of selfhood ... Barker serves up a mixture of experiment and statement, part postmodern comedy, part spiritual credo. It takes as it’s raw material the fear and panic, anxiety and suspicion, depression and despair experienced by a man who wants to sell his house, an estate agent trying to help him sell it, the child of the prospective buyer, and, via moments of authorial intrusion and a brilliant confessional finale, the novelist responsible for creating them. The book exhibits Barker’s gifts as a psychologist ... I Am Sovereign places this agonised trio within an elaborate conceptual framework ... Barker isn’t the first writer to use postmodern devices to explore questions about selfhood, but she diverges from most of her predecessors in rejecting the analogy of the self as “fiction” ... [I Am Sovereign] renders the next stage in this remarkable writer’s journey a more than usually enticing prospect.

The novel is not dead when we have writers as curious, daring and honest as Nicola Barker. Her latest is downright exquisite.

A madly brilliant little book … I loved it.

It marks a cautious pivot away from the involutions of H(A)PPY and The Cauliflower, back towards the highly distinctive take on literary realism that characterizes Barker’s earlier work.

Gobbled all of this down all of this 209 page gem on a single long-haul flight. Set in a single 20-minute house viewing in Llandudno with a bafflingly diverse cast of characters. It shouldn’t work but I thought it was super.

Knocked me sideways … It’s so masterful and meta. The narrative style is elegant and frenetic

[A]bsurdly well-researched, prescient and pin-sharp [...] so definitely pick it up'

[I]t's thrillingly, DELICIOUSLY fascinating about How We Live Now. She's a MINE of information- philosophy, science, literature, stats, all pulled together in her coolly elegant prose. I could not put it down!

These 242 pages are an (exhaustive, though not depressing) middle-finger to the word 'should'. A word which justifies women feeling the need to constantly scrutinise every decision; in the name of self-improvement, in order to have the Best Life Possible, at a hundred miles an hour.

Energetic and compelling.

Sykes stays true to "High Low" form by using a high-low mix of vocabulary ... We have all had moments of asking ourselves if we are doing "this" - gestures vaguely - right, which makes the book all the more likeable. This is a form of learning how to succeed by failing - as it admits to being human.

Pandora is my personal guru on all things relating to the zeitgeist. How lucky you are that she can now be yours too.

This will spark a thousand conversations and encourage us to find our own path to contentment.

Hailed as a manifesto for modern women ... packed with her trademark wit, wisdom and philosophical references (if you know her, you know), this book is the opposite of doom and gloom. Instead, her judgement free observations are reassuring, comforting and wholeheartedly uplifting.

Rushdie is a master storyteller who weaves his fictions and characters into such agreeable tapestries.

The novel's dazzling virtuosity and cascade of cultural references culminate in a final moving moment of hope