[Nicholls is] a peerless historical sleuth. At once a biographer, an explorer and an investigator, he captures the past and its people in lightning-flashes of illumination. In Nicholl's hands, the driest document can rise from the past and shine. Let's hope for many more scintillating revelations from this magician of lost lives

History leaves traces of the people - Byron, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Leonardo - living through it, in portraits, documents and books. In Traces Remain, Charles Nicholl transforms these glimpses through time into comic and poignant vignettes, and curious, intriguing puzzles

It's like seeing an unfinished Michelangelo sculpture-one of those rough, half-formed giants straining to step out of its marble block. It's even more powerful, to a different part of the brain, than the polish of a David or a Lolita.

..."Laura" will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author's perennial themes and obsessions percolating.

...this tantalizing, fascinating, occasionally perplexing manuscript. Pity he didn't get to finish it. Fortunate we get to see it at all.

What literary news could be more thrilling?

There are enough Nabokovian touches...to tantalize any devotee of the English language.

Genius

A masterpiece

Magnificent and long unsung debut novel

Blurs fact and fiction with aplomb… Royle’s novel is a sharp portrait of a man going very wrong.

Extremely good.

Dazzling… Royle attended last year’s Man Booker Prize ceremony as editor of one of the shortlisted titles, Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse… I wouldn’t bet against Royle having to dry-clean the tux on his own account next time.

Royle’s coup is to deliver the pithy sting of a good short story many times over the course of a whole novel.

I admired it so much and wanted to go back and see how it was all put together. His book absolutely enchanted me.

This may be a tricksily metafictional novel but Royle hasn’t forgotten his readers.

5 stars, gripping, innovative and fluent.

Nicholas Royle has produced the holy grail: a literary page-turner. Although it’s published in January, I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make the short list of many a prize at the end of the year.

A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

A vertiginous murder mystery with echoes of JG Ballard, David Lodge and Alain Robbe-Grillet

If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle's skills put himself in charge of the banquet

A brilliant, eerie mix of campus meta-novel, whodunnit, failed-love story and existential contemplation

This just might be the exceptional book which should be judged by its cover

An ingenious tale

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original