Utterly compelling... Cousins is a remarkable book about the strange tact and terrors of family life and the histories that haunt it

Vickers has a formidable knack for laying open the human heart... a layered family drama

Each distinct voice in this complex pattern of relationships is presented with deep empathy and clarity, so that you feel a real three-dimensional quality in the characters. The most painful ethical dilemmas are laid out with compassion and without manipulation. A serious, mature book that is also compellingly enjoyable

A wonderful book. Salley Vickers spins a spellbinding account of a family in distress

A story of secrets, lies and history is elegantly handled... She lays bare the inner workings of one family, possibly every family, with an often disconcerting clarity

If you're a fan of Marilynne Robinson (the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Gilead), you'll love this...a dark and gritty read

No one can dig down into the shrouded recesses of the human heart quite as forensically as Vickers

This is a highly charged novel you'll find hard to put down...The novel raises important issues about motherhood and family connections, and examines the survivor's guilt felt by many of the characters that helps to drive the painful resolution

Vickers ponders undercurrents that swirl down the ages...Vickers commitment to the realism required by fictional memoir...a fascinating exploration of the often equivocal and always cryptic nature of family love

A psychologically acute case study

A story of a family rocked by tragedy

One of our best women writers...Cousins is a towering tale of three generations of the Tye family, spanning 70 years

Salley Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand. She's a presence worth cherishing

Absorbing, subtle and utterly joyous

A magical and at times sinister story about love, loss, secrets and forgiveness

Beautifully and brilliantly controlled. A triumph

Chilling

Extraordinary, gripping... Exquisitely written with lyricism and a stiletto-sharp and humorous pen, Connolly takes on a subject which resonates powerfully with current politics

Brian Van Reet's beautiful, intense, and at times disturbing novel Spoils traces the motivations and desires of combatants on both sides of the Iraq War, showing us what happens when increasing violence and chaos start to warp the choices they're able to make.

Moving immediately into the pantheon of first-rate war novels, Spoils reads like a nightmare within a tragedy, a story that is both touchingly classic and brutally modern, This is a definitive record of the war that marked the end of the American Empire. One of the best novels of our time in the Middle East.

With Spoils Brian Van Reet has given readers an intensely moving novel. That it is also a nearly comprehensive examination of our modern wars is a remarkable demonstration of both the power and relevance of fiction.

In recent years there have been a number of very good novels by veterans of the Global War on Terror. None is as ambitious, inclusive or powerful as Brian Van Reet's Spoils; none has this novel's range or uncanny ability to transport the reader to the battlefield and those rarely explored margins at the battlefield's ragged edge. Spoils is a fantastic debut.

Vivid and fierce, Spoils is an eloquent exploration of humanity. Depicting a world with no obvious villains or heroes, this novel is as important as it is timely. By exploring the nuances of motivation, loyalty, and sacrifice, Van Reet exposes the connections that bind us across even the greatest divides.

The brilliance of Brian Van Reet’s Spoils lies not only in the sheer forward-motion velocity of its plotting, but in the psychological terrain it explores: what a generation of young women and men went looking for in Iraq, what they found, and why that discovery matters so profoundly for the rest of us.

In Spoils, Van Reet has imbued his subject with subtlety — something that it is so often stripped of, both by combatants and the media. One rarely sees a war novel by a soldier with such convincing writing on both sides of the trenches.

This is a great novel… Brian Van Reet [is] a special talent.

An honest glimpse into the action, emotion and futility of war.

The action is realistic and relentless, the writing lean and muscular, the tale harrowing, and the horrors seemingly inevitable but no less powerful for that.

In dazzling and propulsive prose, Brian Van Reet explores the lives on both sides of the battle lines… Depicting a war spinning rapidly out of control, destined to become a modern classic, Spoils is an unsparing and morally complex novel that chronicles the achingly human cost of combat.

Spoils reeks of the fog and futility of war… It has its own blue-collar beauty as it tells its tale from three perspectives: a gay, female US soldier, an Egyptian jihadist and a US tank commander.

Brian Van Reet has firsthand combat experience to draw upon for this powerful piece of fiction, rendering it an intensely humane story, giving credible authenticity to the plot, and scenes presented to the reader… Enlightening, thought provoking and hauntingly mesmerising, I cannot recommend Spoils highly enough to anyone interested in novels about war and conflict.

Every page brims with brutal authenticity.

Spoils bears eye-widening witness to valour, horror, violence, cruelty and absurdity.