A warts and all look at modern policing on the frontline, Thomas pulls no punches as modern British life is played out in all its absurd glory … Dark and hilarious, Ugly Bus is never short of compelling.

Ugly Bus is a blend of darkness and humour … Just when you think it has no more twists and turns to offer, the novel's final scene is startlingly revelatory about who and what a particular person is … there are characters here whose story could well be continued in a third novel … Bring it on, I say, provided it has the tension, momentum, observational keenness and dry wit of this one.

I think what struck me more than anything else was how believable everything was and Thomas' brilliance in setting scenes, creating characters who I felt I could genuinely see and relentless black humour, darkness and pure grit. It's sweary, it's dirty and it's real.

Assured and fluent ... a forensic examination of what it means today to be a man, and to be human

It's a testament to Baxter's skills that so plotless a novel manages to retain such pace and poise...There's something mesmerising about the prose

A writer of courage and lucidity. His fluent and assured prose owes some debt to the Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard. ... Baxter is high literature

Greg Baxter is a writer of style... His proven brand of philosophical literature bypasses current fiction's fad for recklessly baroque construction and aims straight for the higher shelves of the Western canon

Baxter ... deserves to be included with Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk in the current conversation about what fiction can do and where it is going

A gripping novel of forbidden passion and intrigue

A thoughtful read

A well-researched page-turner

Delightfully written with pathos, intrigue and mystery on every page

I devoured it in one sitting and absolutely adored it

Unforgettable . . . I almost cried because all the feelings it made me feel

The world needs this book, YOU need this book

Goldsworthy’s mischievous debut updates that constant trope about gaining the world and losing your soul in a contemporary London setting that is two parts Bulgakov to one part Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill

Albert has made a novel that approaches depression and maternal anxiety with candid honesty, transforming writing on motherhood forever

A hilarious, honest, and eye-opening book, this is a must have for any new mum or mum-to-be

Funny and heartfelt

Ms. Moran['s] ... funny and cheerfully dirty coming-of-age novel has a hard kernel of class awareness ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways.

there’s so much real feeling too. Johanna’s vulnerability and bravado, as she moves out of her world and falls in love is beautifully done’ or ‘ and running through it all, with a visceral power that most writers should envy, is the shame and grinding anxiety of being poor

Moran also writes brilliantly about music, and especially about what music can do. She carries Johanna through this novel with incredible verve, extravagant candour, and a lot of heart. Johanna is … a wonderful heroine. A heroine who cares, who bravely sallies forth and makes things happen, who gives of herself, who is refreshingly unashamed. She’s so confident, it’s glorious

an entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable…Moran is in danger of becoming to female masturbation what Keats was to Nightingales…

rude, big-hearted, wise-cracking novel…so filthy she’ll make you blush

This is going to be a bestseller…A sharp, hilarious and controversial read

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh