Magnificent. An historical tour de force, revealing Clements to be a novelist every bit as good as Cornwell, Gregory or Iggulden. Kingmaker is the best book I’ve read this year by some margin.

It’s amazing … there’s a real sense of time and place, and real immersion in the period, real rounded characters, with utterly plausible lives. Fantastic! People who love Conn Iggulden and Bernard Cornwell are going to love it too.

Toby Clements captures the grimness, grit and grime of 15th-century life, but with compassion and humanity, as seen through the eyes of common people ... period detail is wonderfully accurate as are the setpiece skirmishes and bloodbath at Towton.

It is Clements’s ability to excite both tender emotions and a capacity for bloodthirstiness that has allowed him to achieve what Shakespeare couldn’t manage, and spin a consistently enthralling story out of the Wars of the Roses.

Clements truly lets rip with the poleaxes, billhooks and glaives, sparing no detail as he recreates the blood and thunder of the battlefield ... But mere retro-bloodfest this is not - amid the butchery emerges a tender, heroic love story.

I loved this from the first page, and if you ask me, this is what it’s all about. There’s an immediacy, an accessibility to Clements’ writing that makes the story leap from the page in all its vivid, vibrant glory. In fact this story reads like a film script, which shows that here is a writer who knows his business. Atmosphere, drama, great characters and a brilliantly imagined medieval world - Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims took me on a journey. I’m already looking forward to the next one. Storytelling doesn’t get much better than this.

The first of what promises to be one of the best historical adventure series to hit the shelves this year ... an author born to be a storyteller ... Kingmaker proves to be a thrilling, stomach-churning odyssey into the grime, gore and guts of the brutal medieval world. There is an addictive, raw excitement to Clements’ writing ... Prepare to be shocked, amazed… and thoroughly entertained.

Epic adventuring that had me hooked… I loved this story, non-stop action featuring a lovely pair of modest but surprising heroes…The best adventure novel I have read in quite a while.

If you like your fiction with a bit of grit and swagger, this is really something you should try.

What a book! This superb novel, alive with fire, blood and mud, has brought me as close to the Wars of the Roses as I could ever want to get. Historical fiction at its best ... Kingmaker is one of the finest historical novels I’ve read and fortunately it’s just the first in a trilogy. I look forward to much more from Toby Clements.

His writing has a feel of authenticity that is sometimes lacking in other books. I could almost imagine that I really was standing in the middle of a muddy battlefield with arrows flying around me, walking through a smelly, bustling market place or watching Katherine performing surgery without the benefits of modern medicine. There’s certainly nothing glamorous about this story!

It’s very bloody and bloody good.

The narrative, quick-paced, direct and written in the vivid present ... the repression, anger and bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses was itself frequently beyond belief. Clements’s pages are aflutter
with that conflict’s every emotion.

My best historical novel is Winter Pilgrims. Toby Clements’ blood-fuelled ‘I was there’ rampage through the Wars of the Roses.

Fans of Tudor history in search of post-Mantel fix will be intrigued ... Clements' storytelling is evocative and direct.

Toby Clements has provides ripping action we can be absorbed by and relate to; a talent that many more experienced authors have yet to grasp.

Toby Clements has a rich knowledge of the history of the times and this is evident in his writing. His depictions of the way people lived their lives during this turbulent time in our history is so vivid you feel a definite sense of being there. …the most enjoyable historical novel I have read for some time.

Without beginning, middle, end – and especially lacking centre! – the novel comes to a halt, leaving the reader in a gorgeous daze of symbol and cypher, whose meaning is so clear, and yet tantalizingly opaque.

Satin Island is clever, vogue, slick and sleek.

Packed with intriguing and intellectual ideas… refreshingly thought-provoking.

Slender, foxily postmodern.

The bleeding edge of science fiction is Satin Island.

In Satin Island the narrator, U, takes us on a journey through the modern world of ideas, theories and references. It’s a wonderfully intense experience – as soon as I’d finished I wanted to read it again.

Convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists.

Favourite novel of 2015.

A darkly funny and disturbing meditation on the intricacies and insubstantiality of our technology-ridden times. McCarthy is one of the most daring, most ambitious and most subtle of what at my age I can all the younger generation of writers.

The novel often reads like a dramatic monologue, a very modern stream of consciousness, akin to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake… McCarthy’s novel is innovative, well crafted and challenging… This novel is breaking new ground, a breath of fresh air, at times a tour de force.

McCarthy has put his finger on something, and he’s nailed it very precisely. It’s how we live now. All the information we process every day. What it’s doing to us.

As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved herself an author well worth watching out for

Profoundly moving