Seán Hewitt soars... His poetry will stand the test of time, for...the sheer musicality of the language, the lightness on his metrical feet, and his keen ear for "the music of what happens" charm the reader into submission. This is an astonishingly assured debut delivered in a poetic voice that has eloquence, compassion, and serenity in equal measure...in the pantheistic tradition of Wordsworth, Whitman, John Clare, and Seamus Heaney... When it comes to nascent talent, we Irish have a tendency to mistake the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy for the ninth, thrusting premature greatness upon the liveliest embryos. By contrast, Hewitt seems to have sprung fully formed into the literary world and, on this showing, nothing seems beyond him.

It is extraordinary to encounter a debut collection that feels as established as Seán Hewitt’s… These unmediated poems are, at the same time, charged: they pull you in swiftly, you become immersed… In ‘Tongues of Fire’, the title piece and last in the collection, the present is burning. It is an exceptionally moving poem – impossible to read without a lump in the throat… He grafts the people and circumstances of his life on to nature with unerring brilliance… This is, above all, a devotional collection and will lift the spirits of all who read it…. He has a gift for gravity, rootedness, calm… Hewitt has the confidence to relax and to allow his poems, in an unaffected and sometimes conversational way, to speak to the heart.

I fell into [Tongues of Fire] one morning and read the whole book through and it truly warmed my soul. He's an exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama. It's a stunning collection of poems.

Very accomplished poems.

This is an extraordinary collection - heart-bruising, tender - one to cherish, and live by. Though Hewitt moves us through anguish and destruction, love still glows; and in the dark undoings of these poems, decay lights the wildwood with its strange, ethereal foxfire. As Hewitt writes, "it is hard to tell where heaven starts"; I find it in these poems, which are beyond-gorgeous, beyond-glorious, blood-felt, feral, luminous.

Seán Hewitt understands that poetic form is sacred and mysterious. In these godforsaken times his reverent procedures are food for the soul.

I fell in love with these wild, heartsore, ecstatic poems. They lead us to deep, hushed places - in the woods and heaths, in our hearts and bodies - and unearth such tenderness and dark treasure. Tongues of Fire is a beautiful book and Seán Hewitt is an extraordinary writer.

In Tongues of Fire, Hewitt crafts poems of intense beauty and endless range, which glisten with queer desire... Considered and poised, every line in this stunning compilation surprises and nurtures.

The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time.

A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years.

A highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life's deepest sorrows in losing her child. . . Funny, touching and profoundly moving

‘Getting inside a living person’s head sounds like a colossally bad idea, but Sittenfeld makes it convincing here, just as she did with a character based on First Lady Laura Bush in her 2008 novel, AMERICAN WIFE’

Deviously clever . . . Sittenfeld’s Hillary is both a player in the Game of Thrones and a romance novel heroine. She’s a brilliant badass who has found her voice and knows how to use it. She’s whoever she wants to be

As Hillary finds her groove, so the momentum and entertainment builds, as does your admiration for how ingeniously and plausibly Sittenfeld has re-written the script

A counterfactual novel ... throbs with energy

A fascinating glimpse into an alternative future

Pacy... plenty of sex and gossip - and a cameo from a certain yellow-haired, orange-faced president-to-be... ripe for TV adaptation

A brilliantly smart re-imagining

Sittenfeld's writing is so fine, her characters so vivid, her empathy so profound that she manages to absorb the reader on a level that transcends partisanship. In 2020, that was a remarkable achievement and an enormous gift to her readers

It ends up being a love letter to a type: the female intellectual, who is given none of the licence of her less talented male peers. At the end, i found myself saying Oh My God

A triumphant feminist reinvention. Sittenfeld is the bard of presidential female adjacents

RODHAM is wide- ranging political anthropology, concerned not so much with what makes Hillary tick as it is with the culture around her and how she might have shaped events, and been shaped by them, if the pieces of reality's jigsaw were rearranged just so. It's stippled with clever mischief

A smartly structured character study and a stay- up- all- night plot . . . A captivating and durable story containing rooms within rooms. RODHAM turns into a high- speed bildungsroman about a woman of formidable intellect and self- insight.

It's the genius of Sittenfeld's prose that we come to understand this ambivalence,as well as the deep conflicts in this complicated character. In the longing and loneliness, the anger as well as ambition, this Hillary makes RODHAM a compelling portrait of a future that might have been.

Tantalizing . . . part thought experiment, part wish- fulfillment fantasy . . . delectably discussable, a book tailor- made for book clubs.

Wildly compelling . . . What RODHAM is interested in is examining what feminine ambition looks like when it is untethered from a man. . . . Sittenfeld is free to invent, and the reality she builds is deliciously dishy.

Thought-provoking and compelling

A moving feat of feminist and novelistic imagination

From this memorable novel's eerie first paragraph to its enigmatic ending, Laura van den Berg has invented something beautiful indeed

This is one of my favorite novels of 2015, and we’re not even IN 2015 yet . . .The language is beautiful, spare, and carefully crafted, and the characters are fully realized and unforgettable. There is tension and redemption and insight and even humor in these pages, and they make for a really incredible read

Surreal adventures blend with a reflective and sad sensibility in van den Berg’s lyrical debut novel

Both novels offer precision of language and metaphor and scene even as what is being constructed feels messy, chaotic, sad, hopeless... Both orphaned and alone in the world, both so completely real, both telling a story that feels important and exciting to read. I feel lucky to have stumbled upon these books this year, and challenged by them to be better

This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. . . Van den Berg's writing is curiously beautiful

a strange beauty in this apocalyptic tale