Norris hits this universal note squarely and successfully. Undercurrent is a defiantly unfashionable, heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable novel about mothers and sons, letting go of the past and saying what you need to say to your loved ones before it's too late.

A profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times

Always skilled at creating character and voice... Norris demonstrates how seemingly insignificant moments impact a life.

Beautiful and useful. His writing untangles the knots that tie us down, to families, to history. He writes to free us and deserves our thanks.

Lyrical, yearning, elegiac

Norris is a terrific writer. His characters not only convince, they're invested with a depth of personality that fixes them in the reader's mind long after the book has been replaced on the shelf... Undoubtedly one of the finest novels to come out of these islands this or any year.

Norris's latest novel is a lyrical and affecting examination of love, life and the stories that shape us

A deft novel about a struggling thirtysomething man's chance meeting with a girl he once saved from drowning and the changes the event sets in motion.

A beautiful novel, introspective and thoughtful. Undercurrent washes with a quiet intensity.

Undercurrent is a profound and absorbing story of flux, failures and joys that charts the beautiful, ineffable welter of life itself.

What a beautiful, heartbreaking, wise, triumphant novel. Barney is an extraordinary writer, with a magical ability to reach into the depths of his characters' histories and chart the maps of their lives with grace and love and unstinting empathy. I always feel better about the world and the people in it after reading Barney's work.

Norris is a novelist of such insight and sensitivity that I found myself highlighting entire pages at a time to come back to. Compassionate and unnervingly funny in its depiction of love, grief, family and our points of origin, Undercurrent is a captivating sojourn in another consciousness. I feel like I know these people in real life. Understated but magical; quietly, utterly moving.

Barney Norris has done it again and managed to destroy me with another book. Undercurrent is a powerful and really moving meditation on family and grief, written with all the thoughtfulness and grace I've come to expect from Barney's work.

A novel that, at every moment, chooses to be vulnerable, daring to show as much feeling as it possibly can - all those loves and losses that make up a life.

The best description I have read of ghosts. The process of becoming a spectre. Fragments and glimpses. Scattered memory. I loved it.

A gorgeous, noirish page-turner which also manages to be deeply intelligent. Norris has a remarkable ability to write about love and freedom - his writing shines a light on the way stories shape our lives.

A visceral, beautifully-told, intergenerational story that reaches impossibly beyond the end of life to the first moments of love, through what we inherit from the past, what we may be able to create, and what we leave behind.

A novel about growing up after you have already grown up. Barney Norris writes with enormous compassion for his characters and the world around them

I read Undercurrent with pleasure and admiration. Gripping and thoroughly absorbing

A perceptive novel about family and how the stories of the past we tell aren't always clear-cut

This tender, thoughtful novel captures the dilemmas of being human - the mundane and momentous things left unsaid, and expectations we can't fulfil.

Gripping.

In [Machines Like Me], McEwan has taken his creativity into a subversive alternative 1980s London… the young couple at the centre of McEwan’s story find out the danger in inventing things beyond our control.

Machines Like Me feels like a novel about empathy, and the artificial limits we set on it – by race, by gender, by geographical location – so that we can sleep at night in a world of cruelty and horror.

Machines Like Me is deeply intriguing, a little unnerving and quite captivating… [it] will leave you questioning, and imagining how our not too distant future might look.

Ian McEwan is one of our most venerated living writers… [in Machines Like Me] McEwan shrewdly touches upon the intricacies of artificial intelligence.

McEwan’s prose is, as expected, nuanced, thoughtful and beguiling.

It wasn’t going to be long before [McEwan] swooped upon the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence… Wonderful… [McEwan] pose[s] all sorts of questions about humanity.

Machines Like Me is elegantly constructed, the sentences are consistently lovely, and the character dynamics…compelling.

McEwan knows how to fashion a twisty and pacy narrative, to keep us alive to the possibility that what we’re reading…is not all that it seems.

McEwan muses on love, empathy and the morality and ethics of artificial intelligence… very good.

An important literary contribution to the AI debate, one of the great questions of our time.

Precisely rendered and well observed… [McEwan] neatly delineates humanity’s remorseless self-demotion from the centre of the universe to flotsam.

[An] undeniably another excellent novel from McEwan, who demonstrates that he can conjure up challenging characters, witty dialogue and moral ambiguity when dealing with sex robots just as brilliantly as he does on literary turf.

Dexterous, utterly gripping and intensely thought-provoking.

Deeply unnerving… What starts out as a darkly funny ménage à trois becomes an unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever.

The latest novel from my favourite author tackles the subjects of artificial intelligence and what it is to be human. He does this in a surprising, original way, and Adam, the strong, seductive “robot”, is a character that will haunt me for a long time.

[This] new, gripping, beautifully written and constructed, disturbing, and provocative novel…is a thrilling read… the chilling conclusions that hyper-rationalism can come to are brilliantly described.

McEwan maintains his status as a master of fiction.

A new collection of stories that explores the complex - and often darkly funny - connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

Ian McEwan’s sublimely playful new novel transports you back to the Eighties but with some major changes, including eerily life-like robots… Dark and slyly funny, it’ll also give your brain a workout.

Not only does he pull it off, he does so triumphantly, in the cleverest book I’ve read this year. It’s smart, dark and at times very funny.

A saucy, claustrophobic and darkly funny story which is all rather peculiar. Compulsive reading.

I devoured Ian McEwan’s latest very funny spin on Hamlet.

An ingenious rewrite of Hamlet as a murder story in which a foetus is detective and possible victim.

This is McEwan at his most playfully provocative.

A clever conceit, elegantly wrought, economically constructed.

A bewitching ode to humanity’s beauty, longing and selfishness.

A gripping piece of fiction.

I was hooked from the first page.

[A] smart, eloquent novel.

A enthralling read from one of the world’s master storytellers.

McEwan delights with lyrical prose that is fittingly poetic.

[A] work which both fascinates and disturbs through its unique perspective on a malicious death… Every sentence is a joy to behold, a gift to the reader of delicately considered prose, and thoughtful observations… Alongside its edgy and entertaining narration, and perhaps in part because of it, the novel manages to challenge all preconceptions of the crime genre, upending the whodunit into an extraordinary will-they-do-it… By nature, Nutshell is a novel which perplexes, entertains, and moves the reader in equal turn, all with McEwan’s startling attention to detail, and luxuriant prose style. Read it for its peculiar narrator, read it for the rapidly-changing and intense emotions, or read it just for the thrill of chase as the killing comes to fruition; whatever intrigues you about this novel, just make sure that you do read it – and feel the thrill for yourself.

Brilliantly realised… Any book so bound up in a conceit and in its own verbal fireworks at times runs the risk of being a bit clever-clever. But on the whole we accept in a suspension of disbelief the foetus’s pompous mastery of language and imagery and abandon ourselves to the sheer eloquent pleasure of this hilarious romp.

Short, odd but pleasurable… Great fun, and very well written.

Rich in Shakespearean allusion, this is McEwan on dazzling form.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

Ian McEwan’s brilliance as a stylist and surprise plotter finds a fitting subject in Nutshell…, which is Hamlet as told from inside the womb. Up there with his best.

A gripping tale is told with breathtaking skill, turbocharged with rage against the madness and despair of our modern world.

Nutshell is one of those books you sit down to read and don’t get up until you’ve finished. It is brilliantly executed and full of surprises; original, clever and witty. Simply a must-read

A book I couldn’t put down… brilliantly clever