A fitting end to a trilogy that fans of Bernard Cornwell should devour. The big set-piece battle that completes the book is one of the best that I have ever read.

‘Warrior-like and bloody, homely and heartfelt, ranging across oceans, yet nestled around hearth fires, Giles Kristian’s writing transports you through the Viking world as the thrum, rhythm and holler of the battle field rings out from the page. Wings of the Storm isn't simply an historical novel – it is the glorious embodiment of a time of adventure and passion, of dying old worlds and thrilling new encounters.’

This concludes, in magnificent fashion, Giles Kristian's mighty Viking saga . . . with this marvellous trilogy complete, now is the time to immerse yourself in it, beginning with God of Vengeance.

What more could we ask for than a thrilling conclusion to Giles Kristian’s epic saga of vengeance and betrayal? Written in his glorious poetic prose with the lift and lilt of the waves beneath every sentence, the sense of the gods pressing in on each page, this remains Viking writing at its best: thrilling in its truest sense, heart-rending, and, yes, glorious…

Nobody writes Viking adventures with the panache, power and sheer plausibility of Giles Kristian . . . with supreme skill and a genuine passion, Kristian weaves what little we know about the religion, culture and codes of Dark Ages Scandinavia into a novel that grips like a limpet on the rocky Norwegian coast and rings absolutely true from first to last. The book plunges you into a gore-drenched, glory-decked time of treacherous jarls and lethal shieldmaidens; a time of dark magic and human sacrifice, of wild hunts and vicious feuds, a time of blood-letting and betrayal. But it is also a time of comradeship and selflessness, when the bonds forged between men, and women, can endure beyond death. It’s a time you may never want to leave.

Wings of the Storm is the real Viking stuff. Giles Kristian is the best!

One hell of a dramatic thrilling conclusion . . . the ending is powerful and worth waiting for. Another contender for the book of the year.

‘Kristian eclipses the master of the genre, Bernard Cornwell, in the last set-piece battle, a vivid melee of sword and axe; one of the best battle scenes that I have read’

Karan Mahajan’s thoughtful, touching and perfectly pitched account of two marketplace bombings and the casual havoc they cause in a handful of Delhi families is almost subversive in its even-handedness and its charity. For all its unflinching - and unnerving - fatalism, The Association of Small Bombs is an unusually wise, tender, and generous novel.

A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity... he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his prose against the violence of the events it describes... Mahajan hasn’t lost his sharp comic impulses... [Mahajan's] facility for gorgeous turns of phrase produces many passages of vivid, startling power

In this fine novel, Karan Mahajan has achieved a brilliant and distinctive success. The sources, and unbearable, unending, consequences of a terrorist atrocity constitute a subject extremely difficult to capture in a work of serious literature. But with his intelligence, humanity, and art, Mahajan has given us a deep portrait of life in a kind of darkness.

Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and clarity of vision… He is particularly adept at capturing the quicksilver shifts of mood that accompany states of high emotion

Like a Russian novel set in India, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs has the sweep, wisdom and sensibility of the old masters. Here the humor of Bulgakov and the heart of Pasternak deliver an exploded-view of a small bomb that goes off in a minor market in a corner of South Delhi. Like shrapnel, themes of suffering, dislocation and redemption radiate from the blast, and none will be spared Mahajan’s piercing gaze. Urgent and masterful, this novel shows us how bystander, bomber, victim, and survivor will forever share a patch of scorched ground.

Brilliant, troubling...superbly suspenseful... Mr. Mahajan’s writing is acrid and bracing, tightly packed with dissonant imagery... The sharpest passages examine the terrorist mind-set and the demented rationales for mass murder with such acid-etched clarity that it’s possible to feel the deadly magnetism of the arguments... The finest [novel] I’ve read at capturing the seduction and force of the murderous, annihilating illogic that increasingly consumes the globe

A brilliant examination of aftermath, how life is built of consequences, both imagined and unimagined, the tight web of human life and human sympathy. Karen Mahajan knows everyone, on every side of a detonation: the lost, the grieving, the innocent, the guilty, the damaged. It’s hilarious and also devastating. Karan Mahajan is a virtuoso writer, and this is a wonderful book.

Karan Mahajan is daring comfortable readers to make an uncomfortable connection: between the bomb that goes off on the first page of his book, and the way the pages that follow seem to scatter, in bright-hot shards of heartbreaking story. The Association of Small Bombs ... is a work of disabused intelligence, and staggering compassion. ... Mahajan’s sense of fiction as the history behind history puts him in league with Joseph Conrad, and like Conrad he succeeds brilliantly at writing past Empire, by relating the newest of news-cycles to the oldest of tale-cycles.

Beautifully written... profoundly sad

A powerful novel about one of the defining issues of our age.

At its best, Mahajan’s prose sings with novelty, sensuousness and empathy, keenly alive to many kinds of pleasure.

[A] thoughtful second novel

This is a superb novel… In mimicking the bomb’s structure, Mahajan creates its opposite: a careful, discriminate and moral work of art

A steadily intelligent novel.

A novel that takes us all the way around the bombing, a story about the lives of the victims, the survivors and the bomber. A novel about India that is a novel about the world... A heartbreakingly true and daring novel...that can truly help us understand ourselves, and others, in the dangerous world in which we live

Ask[s] us to consider...lives which rarely find themselves mentioned on the pages of newspapers, let alone in novels

Karan Mahajan's masterful novel explores the aftermath of a small bomb detonation in the '90s in Delhi, and the many people whose lives it alters – from the families of victims to the bombers themselves. With great empathy and no lack of humour, Mahajan shows the multitudinous sides to the kind of story that we usually read a line or two about in a newspaper, or hear short mention of on television

The Association of Small Bombs deftly shifts the reader’s sympathy back and forth between the two men who pull off a relatively insignificant small blast, and the people, sometimes dislikeable, who suffer the consequences. But the moral power of his novel comes from his determination to take individual losses – and choices – seriously, rather than assigning a scale whereby the degree of tragedy is calibrated by high or low body-counts

Karan Mahajan is a writer with great command and acute and original insights. He offers what few can: a stereoscopic view of reality in dark, contemporary times

The Association of Small Bombs is...packed with small wonders of beauty and heartbreak that are impossible to resist

It’s a brave and frequently devastating novel whose themes of displacement and dehumanisation are all too timely

The last book that made my heart race? That’d be Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom: completely propulsive and horrifying and astonishing

A powerful novel about alienation and the illusion of freedom.

Stories of displacement, alienation and inequality add up to dynamic, life-affirming symphony – albeit one punctuated with discordant and unsettling notes.

Mukherjee confronts head-on the appalling deprivation and the caste stigma that bedevil so many lives, and the result is as powerful as it is disturbing.

Mesmerising complexity and the sharpness mixed with compassion and empathy. All the stories are beautifully written… Long after I finished it I realized the characters were still with me, vivid, compelling, haunting