Queen of raw family romances

Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues . . . In the specialised world of women's popular fiction, Cookson has created her own territory

Catherine Cookson soars above her rivals

Your next hit of over-the-top couture drama ... The perfect indulgent long-weekend read.

Something for everyone ... A smorgasbord of rich delights.

What a fantastic start to what is going to be prove to be a fantastic series. Superbly written … it draws you into the story from the word go.

I couldn't put this warm, authentic and compelling novel down … I cheered, laughed, held my breath and wept alongside Fran, her family and friends. I'm already hooked!

Intriguing, emotional, and intense … Would recommend

A heartwarming story of a close-knit community trying to make it through a war. I’d recommend this book to anyone who loves their badass women, war novels, and stories of love and unity in the time of adversity

There are certainly plenty of cliffhangers that need resolution and I'd say a few more skeletons to emerge from the closet too

In this innovative and deeply moving debut, Regina Porter has mastered the kind of alchemy found in a great painting by Poussin: her canvas is vast, her subject ambitious, and yet her execution is so brilliantly devoted to particulars that it creates a miraculous intimacy. The beauty of this book lies in how Porter's characters, through resilience and community, art and creative love, cut new doors out of the corners they've been backed into by history.

Thrillingly ambitious, deeply affecting ... There is so much offered here – race, history, love, loss, and family, just to name a few – that this debut novel should be considered nothing less than a supreme act of generosity.

The Travelers is a great, grand tabernacle of a novel, under the roof of which it seems the entire history of the United States and all its people has been gathered into a single blazing congregation. It is full of tales tall and short, lives black, white, and every shade between, from the north, the south, east, and west. None but the biggest-hearted, sharpest-eyed, most generous-spirited of writers could pull off a book like this. Regina Porter is some kind of visionary.

Regina Porter’s The Travelers is not only the compelling intergenerational saga of two intertwining families but also a deadpan and mordant chronicle of 20th-century America’s casual intolerance and racial violence, as well as a series of portraits of intrepid women, a celebration of family responsibility, and an impassioned reminder that we most honor those we loved by continuing to love others.

In The Travelers, generations of two families – one black and one white – journey across time, race, geography and the wounds of history with sweeping breadth and disarming intimacy. Porter's debut signals the arrival of a fully formed, singular talent. You've been wanting to read this book for a long time; it's just that Porter hadn't written it yet.

[A] brilliant second novel… nothing is lost on Scibona, who builds his narrative masterfully over four hundred pages…[with] always-thrilling prose.

Ten years after his debut with The End, Scibona has produced another exceptional, challenging work… the prose is often stunning.

A muscular account of human frailty and a pitiless critique of western masculinity… The Volunteer drifts and broods… its cumulative power is like sustained rolling thunder.

A bravura piece of writing that reels you in before Scibona starts to make us sweat over his purpose… This is heart-rendering stuff, superbly done… Scibona lavishes attention on practically everyone his sprawling narrative reveals.

Scibona is an observant, lyrical writer, and the strength of his images and musicality of his sentences are almost enough to carry the novel on their own.

A searing yet poetic record of war and the lies people live by.

Monumental and powerful... The Old Drift is a novel that will leave you reeling and picking apart its many ideas, leaving almost no concept unexplored – whether that’s colonialism, capitalism, racial identity, political identity, climate change or government surveillance... Its ultimate hook though is Serpell’s awe-inspiring deftness at jumping from one location, time and character to the next, and fixing you firmly in each and every one. It’s a decidedly impressive debut

Funny, inventive and propulsive

Namwali Serpell’s electric debut novel The Old Drift is richly satisfying in its storytelling and ambition… Sweeping but also playful, Serpell as a major talent

One of my favourite books for many, many years, it's complex and beautiful

Full of magic, history, and humor, The Old Drift will be unlike anything you’ve ever read

Serpell expertly weaves in a preponderance of themes, issues, and history, including Zambia’s independence, the AIDS epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchy, familial legacy, and the infinite variations of lust and love. Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell’s novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel

Namwali Serpell’s spellbinding debut is worth the investment

The Old Drift is an astounding novel… inventive and powerful–it is also surprisingly funny and plays brilliantly with language… beautiful, rewarding and thought-provoking

An original, poetic novel from an already award-winning writer is one of the year’s most anticipated debuts

An impressive book that demands your attention, and rewards your commitment with a beautifully told, richly evocative tale

Comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel's generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics

A mastery of language, a deftness in description, and a dip into surrealist and speculative elements makes The Old Drift a worthwhile study in holding together several storylines through the characterization of those searching for their calling, and the cost of those pursuits

This inventive first novel by Serpell, a Caine Prize winner, spans two centuries in Zambian history, mixing styles from Gothic to Afrofuturist

I recommend Namwali Serpell's 2019 Zambian tour de force The Old Drift. This is a long book – all 563 pages of it – by a writer whose prose and outsize imagination will hold you spellbound throughout

A tremendous novel, completely hypnotising

I loved Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift, a shimmering, shape-shifting epic of Zambia written over twenty years