Kate delivers for her fans . . . and keeps suspense high enough to keep readers turning pages.

Christine Donougher's seamless and very modern translation of Les Misérables has an astonishing effect in that it reminds readers that Hugo was going further than any Dickensian lament about social conditions ... The Wretched touches the soul

Achingly good … Satisfyingly tricky when it comes to speeding up and slowing down, keeping readers off balance, teasing them about when what’s already irrevocable is actually going to happen … At his best – and he is at it often – Lee displays a nimble metaphysical wit and a verbal ingenuity on a par with Martin Amis … In High Dive, the ticktock means more than the boom… The novel’s last, almost whispered word about the bombing’s carnage is left to stand among the most devastating observations ever made about terrorism: “Someone had considered this fair”. It is Jonathan Lee’s great achievement to have written, on this of all subjects, one of the gentlest novels in memory.

Jonathan Lee [is] a wordsmith of incomparable eloquence…High Dive is a work of serious and thoughtful integrity.

An ingenious and original mixture of the domestic and the political, set in the days leading up to the Brighton bombing of 1984. At its heart is a father-and-daughter relationship that feels uncannily real and wonderfully touching.

Achingly good … on a par with Martin Amis … In High Dive, the ticktock means more than the boom… The novel’s last, almost whispered word about the bombing’s carnage is left to stand among the most devastating observations ever made about terrorism: “Someone had considered this fair”. It is Jonathan Lee’s great achievement to have written, on this of all subjects, one of the gentlest novels in memory.

Hauntingly atmospheric ... Lee is quite brilliant at excavating the disappointment of characters constantly chasing lost opportunities.

Devastating ... Inspired ... We make so many complex emotional investments in the lives of Lee's characters that it takes a monk's restraint not to flip to the very end of the book before you get there.

High Dive is a novel so smart and compassionate and beautifully written that it asks for total immersion. A reader will hold her breath for long, perfectly-paced stretches, and she will surface, dizzied, at the end.

The novel is full of gentle humour: its tones are mostly warm and compassionate…High Dive is a moving and charismatic novel…It succeeds, through its multiple sympathies and scrupulous empathy, on its own terms

Engrossing … Effortlessly switching between Belfast and Brighton in stylist prose that perfectly captures the tension and tenor of the times, it’s highly recommended.

Novels about terrorism aren’t usually this tender. It’s Lee’s way of bringing home the cost of bloodshed ... A tragi-comic tale full of warmth and muddled humanity.

High Dive is a fascinating look into a troubled past. In taut scene after taut scene, with a fine style and wit among the carnage, Jonathan Lee does service to history and the novel both.

Lee masterfully ekes poetry out of everyday life…As a character study High Dive is faultless. Freya, Moose and Dan exist, you know them, they are gloriously and fully realized.

Lee has crafted an absorbing character piece that feels startlingly real. Even though the dread of the looming disaster is always there, the main characters’ stories are given plenty of room to breathe and their mundane struggles with everyday life are extremely relatable. High Dive is funny, troublesome and poignant, and will cement Lee’s reputation.

Lee is a virtuoso storyteller, combining the skills of a historian, a reporter, a criminal psychologist, and most importantly, a close observer of the complexity of everyday life.

The language [is] beautiful from the start ... He has a real gift for writing ... beautifully written throughout.

Hauntingly atmospheric ... Lee is quite brilliant at excavating the disappointment of characters constantly chasing lost opportunities ... The protagonists generate a static energy, gathering charged particles of the particular ... The IRA used a long-delay detonator on the Brighton bomb and Lee employs this modus operandi himself, cleverly allowing their plot to provide his. Having planted this device we are left with the drama of waiting, a surface tension that holds the somewhat diffuse elements together. There are echoes of Beckett ... High Dive is, of course, a historical novel, detailing events that took place more than 30 years ago, yet there is always a sense of immediacy to the prose ... In the mundane, Jonathan Lee finds the deep end, where all are diving for dear life.

I loved Jonathan Lee's High Dive . . . It is brilliantly observed.

Lee is a brilliant writer.

Marvellous ... one of the surprises of the book – which opens with the brutal initiation into the Provisional IRA of Dan, the third of the three protagonists, and ends with the front of the Grand being ripped out – is that it is frequently funny.

“What would it feel like to fall from a great height? In this highly accomplished third novel, this is a sensation that characters experience both physically, high diving at the local swimming pool, and metaphorically, plunging into despair when they lose their most uplifting relationships. The absorbing plot moves between Belfast and Brighton, culminating on 12 October 1984, when a bomb exploded at Brighton’s Grand hotel, where Margaret Thatcher was staying during the Conservative party conference. The author powerfully uses a prismatic range of perspectives: Dan, an IRA bomber; Moose, the deputy manager of the hotel; and Moose’s 18-year-old daughter, Freya. The political is intricately interwoven with the personal and the novel’s most moving sections chronicle the implosion of Moose’s marriage and morale. Lee dives deep into the minds and hearts of his characters, skilfully shoring up “the private moments history so rarely records”.

Jonathan Lee may not be a name tripping off many readers’ tongues today, but my guess it soon will be ... In an age when anonymity is a struggle, Lee seems to have mastered the art, with biographical details scant on this British-born writer who currently lives in New York. Such lack of context makes even more intriguing that his third novel, the utterly absorbing and beautifully wrought High Dive, should be a reimagining of the events surrounding the bombing of The Grand Hotel in Brighton by the IRA during the Conservative Party conference in 1984. The novel weaves its way towards the tragedy, between Belfast and Brighton, and in the company of three main protagonists: Dan, a young IRA convert, the long-rumoured but never located second bomber; Freya, a bright school-leaver working at the Grand Hotel; and her father Moose, the aspirant Assistant General Manager.

What is clear straight away is how good Lee is on character…Lee has a memorable turn of phrase…He can be funny too…Deftly captures the boorishness of a Tory conference.

A beautifully realized novel about the intertwining of loyalty, family, ambition and politics. Lee’s truest antecedent is not The Day of the Jackal, but Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent … Its narrative works like the long-fuse bomb that is placed fairly early on in the proceedings, slowly ticking away under the floorboards of the reader’s mind, getting louder and more fraught as the detonation approaches … Although the matters at hand – terrorism, mortality, failure – are weighty, High Dive carries itself with an admirable lightness … Long after the bomb goes off, long after I closed the book, I found myself wondering about Moose and Freya and Dan. That persistence of interest is a testament to how fully realized those characters are, and how astonishingly well executed this novel is.

An idiosyncratic imagining of the Brighton boming of 1984 . . . The scenes of everyday life in the hotel are rich in the comedy of the mundane: the hopes and petty quarrels neatly contrasted with the approaching terror, the actors in the drama ignorant of what the reader knows is coming.

A completely absorbing novel about the lives of people who struggle in small and massive ways. Lee’s writing is poignant, fluid, and very funny. Above all else it feels honest – you can see yourself in all of his characters. I really did love this book, and I’m still thinking and worrying about it.

With wry wit and profound tenderness, Jonathan Lee’s High Dive highlights the tensions---between hope and heartbreak, struggle and surrender---at the intersection of the mundane and the momentous. A bold, thrilling triumph of a book.

In the run up to the bombing Lee masterfully fleshes out the three characters, moving back into their respective histories and creating around them a painfully real world populated by unfulfilled dreams (Freya), ill health (Moose) and odd jobs (Dan)…Lee masterfully ekes poetry out of everyday life…As a character study High Dive is faultless. Freya, Moose and Dan exist, you know them, they are gloriously and fully realized…For sheer beauty of description and engaging personal tone my recommendation is High Dive.

High Dive is gripping from the very first page; we see Dan’s initiation into the IRA and we’re introduced to his elusive and enigmatic boss Dawson McCartland. Jonathan Lee ensures the novel is tense and disturbing from start to finish …High Dive is a carefully paced, melancholic and thought-provoking historical novel. Lee writes the most ordinary and mundane details of daily life in such a stunning way that none of it is boring.

In fluent, agile prose Jonathan Lee takes on one of the more famous assassination plots in recent history with striking evenhandedness and depth. His novel offers a funny, gripping and ultimately tragic view into the life of a young IRA man and the dear price he, and his victims, pay during the dark years of the Troubles.

Lee is a writer of concision, humour, wisdom and danger.

High Dive is both wistful and very funny. It is also genuinely lyrical. But more than anything, what distinguishes it from so many other novels is its rare sincerity.

[Full of] sensitivity to the complexity of human motivations . . . memorable.

Every assassination is a plot with personal history and national history intertwined, action and inaction offsetting each other, misstep transforming into opportunity, luck submitting to fate. Jonathan Lee is a virtuoso storyteller, combining the skills of a historian, a reporter, a criminal psychologist, and most importantly, a close observer of the complexity of everyday life. What a thrilling new novel.

A work of thoughtful integrity.

It’s 1978. Meet Dan, a Belfast boy who wants to join the IRA. Now meet Freya, a young woman who works in the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Dan checks in. So does Margaret Thatcher. We know what will happen.

This year’s most exciting fiction debut is a wild ride through the grimy, glorious city of the 1970s...a book that is truly that great, rare thing: a wholly inhabitable universe, reflecting back our lives while also offering an exhilarating escape from them

Expert storytelling, lyricism and authenticity…Fans of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch: you’re going to love this book

The hype is justified: this is the year’s must-read book

A gripping, atmospheric and authentic take on the decade when the Big Apple seemed almost rotten to the core

For almost a thousand pages, he swirls around a single tragedy — the shooting of a college student in Central Park — sweeping up tangential characters and making every one of them thrum with real life until the lightning strikes, the electric grid overloads and the city goes mad on that dark summer night in 1977.

The grit of the city provides an equal lure. As garbage blows, graffiti scrawls, and street fashions strut through Vinyl and City on Fire, who wouldn't swoon?

A vast cast of characters and intricate sub-plots, City on Fire has been compared to everything from Bleak House to the early work of Jonathan Franzen. Not to mention nods to Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe.

Despite being a debut, it shows a technical maturity matched to a playful, sexy wit… A thriller, albeit an extremely clever and stylish one.

Imaginative debut… His eyes for the tiny things that make up life suggests better is to come.

This is one of those enormous books that might, if you’re luck, grab you and keep hold for days and days.