A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political

This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so the tragedy of what happens is all the more heartbreaking.

How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course… Bragg… not only displays a remarkable gift of observation – of human beings, animals, landscapes – but has written an impassioned elegy for a way of life that has come into head-on collision with the modern world

A literary force... In so richly depicting the hermetic bond between the Cumbrian landscape and the people who live there, she makes a subtle political point about the ease with which governments and big business disregard those whose lives are, for the most part, hidden from view

Toward Mellbreak tells the story of struggling Cumbrian fell farmers, with a blunt lyrical richness that is resonant of Ted Hughes

A lyrical and compelling generational story of Cumbrian hill farmers that wears its spiritual seriousness of purpose lightly but oh so movingly

Savagely elegant… If Thomas Hardy had ventured to historic Cumberland, this is the tenor of the tale that he would have written… Bragg writes with cinematic poetry: in empathetic close-up to her few characters, in wide-angled landscape illumination of the fell­scapes that both liberate and contain them. The world that she conjures so deftly is a world away from the visitors’ Lake District… Sometimes in clipped sentences like gasped breath, sometimes by unfurling parables of light over landscapes, Bragg recreates an extra­ordinary, often disregarded world, uniting farm and fell, work and prayer, suffering and redemption in new and powerful ways

This is a book which stayed with me well after I finished it… A very thoughtful book with plenty to mull over

A closely observed rural family chronicle, a fierce indictment of the ignorant authoritarianism of government agencies in recent decades promoting untried, environmentally disastrous and lethally poisonous pesticides in the countryside, and an understated but strong celebration of spiritual discovery and resilience

In an audacious twist, Alma Katsu has made something new and suspenseful from the legendary story of the Donner Party. The Hunger is filled with terror, pity, and grue.

Alma Katsu has taken one of the darkest and most chilling episodes in our history, and made the story even darker, even more terrifying. I swear I'm still shuddering. A fantastic read!

The Hunger is a bold and brilliant novel, heavy with foreboding and dread, and with a rich vein of humanity at its core. I challenge you to read it without experiencing your own hunger pangs.

The Revenant by way of The Walking Dead and it works.

A terrific historical novel with a thrilling, bloody twist. Alma Katsu’s brilliant reimagining of the Donner Party’s fate is rich with character, laden with imminent doom, and propelled by chilling mystery. A novel that book clubs and dark fiction fans should devour with equal relish.

Katsu injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party . . . fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills.

A riveting drama of power struggles and shifting alliances . . . the tensions [Katsu] creates are thrilling.

If you think the story of the Donner Party can’t get more horrific, think again. In this gripping, atmospheric reimagining of that dark tale, Katsu has created a deeply unsettling and truly terrifying masterpiece.

The lives and stories, loves and tragedies, animating From a Low and Quiet Sea are wonderfully individual and finely alive. This is a brief book: yet one that lingers long in the reader’s mind.

As moving as anything written about Syria

It is vomit-inducing, it’s so good.

Bewitching…unforgettable...It takes a good writer to frame right and wrong within a coherent narrative and make it not feel like a finger-wagging sermon. It takes a great one, however, to make the contents heave and sigh before your eyes.’

Empathy shines through the work

Ryan has the ability to shatter your heart into a million pieces with every book he writes - and even have you welcome the pain.

An example of masterful storytelling

With each novel Ryan gets better, and this moving and quietly insistent work is his best yet.

You can sense his compassion in the bones of his work

Devastating and masterful

A hugely affecting, moving read. I was heartbroken by the end, but adored every chapter

Beautiful

Each section displays Ryan’s range as a writer... [he] writes with brilliant empathy.

Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose.

Heartbreaking … Arguably the best of the new wave of Irish writers to have emerged over the last decade

Ryan has the gift of ventriloquism - he inhabits his fictional creations thoroughly, enveloping you in their worlds

Sublime

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan made me laugh and cry and forced me to look strangers in the eye

Beautifully bleak and characterised by his remarkable ability to write about grief and common humanities.

Beautiful, compassionate

Superlatives wouldn’t do for describing From a Low and Quiet Sea … understated, and gloriously heart rendering

Strout turns her clear, incisive gaze on the intricacies and betrayals of small town life

Anything is Possible is predictably great because it's written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable - because it is written by Elizabeth Strout