This strange and beautiful novel brings to life an entire world. Wild Houses is a book not just to read but to live inside

Colin Barrett quietly, insistently, writes so deeply into his characters you could reach out and touch them. Wild Houses is a gift of true storytelling and Barrett’s talent burns up the page

Vivid, controlled, very funny, and very moving - Barrett has the kind of pure writing chops that are vanishingly rare

Wild Houses is a wonder of a novel - crackling with tension and gifted with fine, strong language. Colin Barrett is a superb storyteller, and this is a tale for the ages

Few people truly understand the deep tensions, traumas and banality of violence that can be found in small town life quite like Colin Barrett. Crime and the characters who commit it is his forte, but his writing is never less than masterful, and he sits squarely in the centre of a golden generation of new Irish writers

Colin Barrett proved with his short stories that he's not only one of the most stylistically gifted writers working now, but also one of the most generous. His first novel, Wild Houses, is deft, intricate, unique - restorative in its refusal to be anything but itself. Colin Barrett is a talent of the rarest kind

A brilliant novel... Wild Houses is swift, tender and honest. It's been a long time since I've been so worried, so heartbroken, so moved by a set of funny misfits. Barrett is one of our keenest observers of the miraculous amid the everyday and of the uncommon beauty of common things, the power of attention. When I finished this novel, I desperately wanted to call Dev, Doll, or Nicky, just to see if they were okay, to see if everything had turned out alright.

Vivid and wild, funny and chilling - Wild Houses is the business

Wild Houses has a rare momentum that comes from the rhythms of the sentences, the vivid descriptions and the brilliantly chosen details. The momentum emerges also from the depth and complexity of the main characters and the wide sweep of the narrative. In a small town in the west of Ireland over a few days, a whole world, memorable and edgy, is captured for the reader

Wild Houses is a taut, brooding thunderstorm of a novel

By turns raucously funny, tense and deeply affecting, it has been well worth the wait

Now She Is Witch is a meticulously researched piece of fantasy

Kirsty Logan is one of the darkest and most playful of writers working right now

Frequently compared to Angela Carter for her luxuriant imagination and love of fairytales, Logan shifts from the uncanny to the terrifying in her new collection

What Logan brings to her story is a fierce and dream-like poetry that creates layer upon layer of memorable moments and images

Logan…captures the mood of the times with a fearful precision… [she] brings…a fierce and dream-like poetry that creates layer upon layer of memorable moments and images… [Now She Is Witch is] compelling, haunting, and enriching

'[An] intricate and finely crafted debut novel . . . The New Life brims with intelligence and insight, impressed with all the texture (and fog) of fin de siècle London'

'Crewe distinguishes himself both as novelist and as historian . . . He has, more unusually, found a prose that can accommodate everything from the lofty to the romantic and the shamelessly sexy'

Unflinchingly bold . . . Crewe's language is striking in its originality, his protagonists are colourful and passionate, and their principles are brilliantly drawn

Sexy, cerebral and moving

'Atmospheric . . . Extraordinary . . . Crewe's taut prose is shot through with descriptive vividness'

Exhilarating . . . An adroit novel of ethics

'Lyrical, piercing . . . The New Life is a fine-cut gem, its sentences buffed to a gleam . . . [Crewe's book] brims with élan and feeling, an ode to eros and a lost world, and a warning about the dangers ahead'

'Crewe deserves applause for his vivid scene-setting . . . There's much to admire in this meticulously researched, boldly envisioned debut'

'Nothing less than remarkable . . . A beautiful, brave book that reminds us of the terrible human cost of bigotry; this is a novel against forgetting'

'Rich and engrossing . . . blending the graceful ambiguity of literary fiction with the deftness of a page-turner . . . A smart, sensual debut'

A few established novelists continue to write first-class literary fiction on LGBTQ themes... The debut novel by Tom Crewe...reveals a new talent in the field. It is underpinned by extensive research... [with] a great story at its heart.

The New Life drives with a satisfying pace and a pleasing sense of both conclusion and open endings... how impressive it is that Crewe has synthesised a coherent and compelling fiction from his elements

Superb . . . Remarkably sensuous and intimate

Crewe demonstrates rare promise in this beautifully crafted story about two real-life pioneers who tried to make a case for homosexuality in Victorian Britain... Crewe brings this era pungently to life

[An] incredibly assured debut... A fresh take on the historical novel, with desire at its heart, written with a charged certainty that the personal is political

A rich, panoramic novel stuffed with vivid characters, heartaches and hazards... [a] brilliant debut

Crewe's beautiful novel is filled with nuance and forensic insight into love. Deftly recreating the atmosphere of 1890s London, The New Life is a tour de force of intelligent and empathetic fiction

A debut of impressive skill... Crewe is a trained historian and it shows: the period detail is exquisite

The novel is full of exquisitely drawn detail, right from the opening scene, making the moral and social dilemmas at the centre of the story dynamic and compelling

[A] pitch-perfect debut novel

Sometimes there comes along a debut novel that feels like an immediate classic. Tom Crewe’s The New Life is just such a book. It’s a beautifully crafted, seductive story about illicit desires in Victorian London