Bask in the brilliance . . . Golden Age Amsterdam, Versailles, the court of Charles I - it's armchair travel with a unique companion

Original, ambitious, moving

A stunning and captivating tale

My heart swelled with FEELINGS!

Ornate, vivid, deeply coloured, and so precise I could smell and taste the world . . . the story of a dog crossing continents and centuries in search of the man he loves is moving and tender. I was captivated by its charm from the beginning

It's a rich and complex tale, beautifully told. Historic detail and dog-like thinking are vividly conveyed, carrying the reader along. It is a joy to read. It raises deep questions about what it means to be human

A tale of love and unbreakable bonds

A grand sweep of adventure and travel, war and romance, and a rich exploration of love, life and loyalty

Dog lovers will want to have this heartbreaking, century spanning novel for their next discovery

Beautiful. Rich in perseverance, love and the sweetness of life

A lyrical commentary on war, rivalry, sacrifice, and above all else, loyalty

Timeless. Humanity's foibles and failings are on full display. This soulful debut is a charmer

With a hint of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Tomorrow confronts big questions about life's purpose and celebrates life's pleasures

Damian Dibben's novel is guaranteed to make you shed a tear . . . sure to appeal to readers who enjoy fiction embedded in history

The story of a dog that doesn't die, of the wonders he'd seen, and the horrors, who lost his master a hundred years ago and has been searching for him ever since, Tomorrow is an epic tale of love, of courage, of hope

What a novel! Ambitious and wonderfully achieved. A book to read again and again

Definitely - HIGHLY - worth the read!

Staggeringly ambitious, innovative, beautifully written... The Porpoise has the pace of a really good thriller, but combined with a subtlety and depth that few thrillers possess

A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery. I read it on the plane in a single sitting at 30,000 feet and enjoyed every second. Gorgeously written and very clever, but also such fun! Ancient and modern overlap and tangle in exhilarating ways, it’s like romping through a Literary Netflix: an episode of something historical and bloody, then something slick and contemporary, then something really weird and unnerving. So many pleasures in one book. The Porpoise is a joy to read

There is storytelling of such primacy in Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise, that when I turned the last page, I was left completely elated. A gorgeous, enlivening experience. It is also one that insistently asks: how? How did all this add up to something so sublime? How, with all its subtle slips, and stunningly weird passages, could this strange, beautiful book feel so finely composed? It is disarmingly wild. And the story itself, in which the myth of Appolonius, remixed as Pericles by Shakespeare and George Wilkins, is again turned inside out, thrown backward and forward, and hurled against oceans (in an act of imaginative heroism by the author), invites us to understand something Haddon always has, which is that even stories as old as this one can remain relevant to our current moment. Especially if they are told with this much originality and conviction

Mark Haddon cuts right down to the grittiness of humanity every time he writes. The Porpoise is a beautiful, unputdownable, ancient tangle with its own sweeping tides and dangerous depths

It's hard to describe just how much tremendous joy and pleasure there is on every page

Haddon deftly adapts this ancient myth for the 21st century to illuminate a timeless, ugly truth about how the violent appetites of men strip women of their agency

Beguiling yet unsettling

A fantastical narrative that involves rampaging pirates, ghost women and princesses...Bold

This gripping and evocative novel questions the nature of the stories we tell ourselves and others

A rollicking fantastical narrative

A wild adventure...full of splendid incident... There is much to enjoy in this novel -- the liveliness of Haddon's imagination and the virtuosity of his style

[The Porpoise] achieve[s] the truly Shakespearean feat of simultaneously conveying disgust at the darkest aspects of human behaviour and relishing them, making the reader feel horribly – and deliciously – complicit

Stamped with the same bold and original imagination… Haddon’s mash-up of myth and history may have a fantastical feel, but once the reader has adjusted to his exuberant originality they will find prose on every page that is pure joy

Haddon writes with wrenching beauty about how the world inflicts itself on the disadvantaged... It's a testament to Haddon's prodigious gifts as a storyteller that this strange, epic adventure is so compulsively readable

A strange, tangled web of a story, drawing on ancient mythology and expanding into time travel… this innovative novel offers escapes into multiple worlds

Irresistible storytelling that slides between the present day and a mythic realm… A heady delight

The novel draws on Shakespeare and Greek legend, and is the sort of mile-a-minute adventure you can get lost in for hours without realising

[The Porpoise] confirms the sense of a gifted writer letting his talent off the leash at last… Mind-bending yet marvellously readable, it stakes Haddon’s claim to be one of the best writers in Britain right now

Haddon conveys all this with startling granularity: the stinking, seething Jacobean London traversed by the ghosts of Wilkins and Shakespeare… Haddon's novel creates, throughout, a looming sense that something very bad but not quite perceptible is in the process of unfolding: a terrible half-glimpsed fate that the characters are powerless to resist

The Porpoise begins as a page-turning thriller and soon shifts into something slippery and strange – but remains propulsive throughout

Mark Haddon’s best novel yet. The Porpoise begins as a propulsive thriller…and segues into a classical-world adventure that reinvents the story of Pericles in prose of a hallucinatory vividness

The Porpoise reworks legend with the compelling force of a thriller

[An] exquisite retelling of Shakespeare’s Pericles

Thrilling, dramatic and exquisitely written, The Porpoise combines myth and reality to enthralling effect

Vuong…[is] a keen anthropologist of the contemporary American experience.

A beautiful novel full of raw feelings.

[A] phosphorescent debut novel… Vuong layers past and present brilliantly in a shifting series of brief episodes and striking mood-musings from within the mind of his protagonist… the hyperreality of Little Dog’s self-awareness is always a delight.

Staggering, sensual and poetic

[A] stunning debut… Ocean Vuong crafts lyrical, masterful prose in this emotionally-powerful piece of story telling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is sure to stay with readers long after they have put the novel down.

A brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.

A tender exploration of violence, migration and language.

This romantic, lusciously written debut lingers over kisses.

A magical synthesis of memoir, fiction and poetry.

So very full of beauty and power. Also, grace.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is a stunning, relentless work of pure passion and I was captivated from the go.

A story that is deeply relatable, understandable and can find common currency with us all. He uses his differences to connect us, to show the links that bind us, to explore violence, masculinity, poverty and yearning… you’ll quickly get carried away by his undercurrents into spaces and places you’d perhaps never thought of exploring or even realised existed.

Vuong’s gift lies in his ability to write with beautiful specificity while digging into the wounds of immigration, culture, queerness and memory. I’ve read many very good books in 2019 but none have obliterated me like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Ocean Vuong is a magician with words. When he writes, it's as if language itself is dancing. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is… a brutally honest exploration of race, class and masculinity. This debut novel is a luminous, mesmerising gift.

Astounding.

Vuong jettisons the prose for poetic verse, with Roland Barthes, Duchamp’s Fountain and queer love all collapsing into splintering lines of verse. Vuong’s sentences are so beautiful, sometimes I would say them over and over again in my head, hoping I might be able to trap them in there.

[Vuong is] brilliant and so flexible with language and has such an understanding of what an emotion incarnate is, he is able to not condense it but to heighten it across languages, across countries, across codes as characters speak to one another. He's peerless.

[A] triumphant debut novel... On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous felt like a true masterpiece being crafted before my eyes, and I was devastated to see the novel draw to a close. I truly can't recommend this book highly enough - I don't remember the last time I was so floored after reading something that I had to take the rest of the day off speaking to family... a passionate, eye-opening journey, and is most certainly one to be added to your lockdown reading list.

Beautifully written... Unlike anything I have read before

An engrossing coming-of-age story.

[Vuong] is an author of incredible and magical talent, with many of his paragraphs reading like the most beautiful poetry... An absolute must-read

Raw, lyrical and at times hearth-wrenching, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a book of real beauty

For a long time after I read this, I could still feel the impact of his story. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is an experience that you need to have.

I read the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong while on tour and the language often stopped me in my tracks... powerful.

Inventive... [On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous] just stops you as a reader to marvel at the beautifully constructed narrative