A marvellous plot, clever dialogue, and complex characters distinguish The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic. With the intimacy of a classic fairy-tale and the rollicking elements of modern epic fantasy, Emily Croy Barker's delightful debut will sweep readers into another world. Fun, seductive, and utterly engrossing, this wonderful tale of magic and adventure is a perfect escape from humdrum reality

To read The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic is to enter a lush, fantastical dream filled with beauty and strangeness, love and cruelty, playfulness and gravitas. Emily Croy Barker has crafted a wholly imaginative and witty debut novel that is unlike any I've read

Thoughtful, ambiguous and powerful

Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel

Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous – its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility

A gripping reading experience, where one is compelled to unravel the results. The emotional reality for each character is beautifully drawn; we feel deeply for each of the women caught in this mess. . . Vivid and psychologically convincing . . . a superb choice for summer holidays

There are no heroes or villains here, but complex people making difficult choices in an imperfect world.

Beneath the farce is a profound examination of immigration, and the lengths people go to for a better life

Fast-paced comedy with a serious side… Highly entertaining

That rare beast: a novel full of heart of conscience that never takes itself too seriously

This is a humorous and action-packed story… It’s about rags-to-riches, bad-to-good, with a picture perfect happy ending. Witty, insane, unhesitating, Puertolas has produced a delightful and ridiculous first novel

It’s an intriguing read and I’d love to know what Romain Puértolas will write next

Thought-provoking, a fast-paced comedy.

Fine and wonderfully original debut novel.

A hauntingly brilliant first novel about how we respond to the past... I envied, as well as admired, this author's literary command. A star is born.

One of the year’s most impressive first novels…Hunters in the Snow’s ambition, scope and assurance…are thrilling and admirable, and make for a very fine book indeed.

Wonderfully lyrical… Ambitious and moving

extraordinary first novel... a 21st-century War and Peace

Both heart wrenching and uplifting, a stunning, intricately plotted, brilliantly written, tour-de-force of a novel that burns into the memory

Mr Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully... its ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is one of the most accomplished and affecting books I've read in a very long time.

At the start of Marra's ambitious first novel, set in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War, eight year-old Havaa escapes the Russian soldiers that are carting off her father and flees a home set alight. Marra then plunges into a complex, beautifully crafted series of events, full of secrets and elegant moments, all wreathed in a frozen world.

Some novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel. Taking place in war-ravaged Chechnya across a decade, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a stunning debut, following a timid but determined country doctor and the girl he rescues once her father is arrested and presumably killed. Marra elegantly slides across time and perspective, mastering an omniscient voice that reveals each character’s future, present, and past, all in acrobatic sentences that leap through time.

A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles… Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly… I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book

Marra is a brisk and able story-teller, and he moves deftly between a number of characters who are drawn into contact by the war… The writing is vivid throughout

Original, insightful