It's very, very rare for a writer to be equally good at poems and novels. John Burnside is. He's a brilliant poet, a brilliant memoirist, and a brilliant novelist ... breathtakingly good

The most defining aspect of Burnside's work aside from its linguistic exactness is the beauty of his prose. Quite simply, he is a wonderful writer. Whatever he is writing always seems real and, considering much of the content of this new novel, that is a considerable asset for any storyteller

Burnside allows the ambiguity to remain in a hauntingly memorable book

In this beautifully sustained novel madness, mystery and myth-making collide. Burnside has an eerie attunement to the ineffable nature of existence and the fictions we construct to navigate and explain it

The novel invites you to view storytelling as akin to madness...In a book that often makes coded reference to itself to provoke serious thought as to what fiction is about, this counts as a joke. Its evasions may discomfit those who like to know exactly where they stand, but those who enjoy being teased as well as spooked should relish an eerie, ethereal novel that alludes to Lewis Carroll and uses methods of Hitchcock and David Lynch

Memorable, atmospheric and compelling

A beautiful and haunting book...A charming and deeply imaginative novel

Lyrical in his descriptions on the land of the midnight sun

Burnside's prose has been frequently praised for its clarity, poetic sonority and fine cadences. It is certainly so here ... A Summer of Drowning marries philosophical meditation with the gooseflesh verve of a thriller

Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer. And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange

Unsettling, hauntingly memorable tale

Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'

[A Summer of Drowning] brings an eerie glow to the colours and sounds, flora and foodstuffs of the far north

This is a love story, told in reverse, a haunting tale of youth and lost love, and a poetical thriller.A powerful debut and a distinctive voice

Elanor Dymott’s gorgeous debut novel is a murder mystery that’s also a brilliant meditation on love and memory and loss. Like the Robert Browning poems her characters read at Oxford, the book is spooky, lovesick, dark, and lush, its narrator circling obsessively back on the death at its heart

An irresistible blast of an opening which never disappoints in a journey into a complex knot of intense and ultimately destructive relationships from which the murder that is the dark core ofThis excellent debut novel distills

A beautiful, lucid nightmare of a book. A mystery of love and murder that is elegantly written, disturbing, always compelling, and lingers long in the mind

A literary thriller wrapped up in a whodunit love story, Elanor Dymott's debut makes for compulsive reading. The complexity of the plot put me in mind of The Secret History;
it deserves to reach just as wide an audience

Every Contact Leaves a Trace is beautifully paced, from the graphic event at its start through all its shifting possibilities to its strange, logical conclusion. It is a marvelous book

Erudite debut

This murder mystery...gripped me with unusual force... This novel sucks you in beautifully, and will not let you go

This is a class act which unveils its secrets as tantalisingly as a courtesan

Wonderfully evocative of Oxford, this is a love story and a mystery that will keep you guessing

Part love story, part murder mystery… Dymott’s novel is ample proof of the literary flair that lurks within some lawyers

One of the best books I’ve read this year