This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there. Acker emerges as an unlikely literary hero, but an utterly convincing one.

The path of the female artist. Is hell. Chris Kraus's veracious and intricately structured portrait rouses and stirs as it documents in meticulous and fascinating detail the life, work and body of Kathy Acker and what it takes to a become a 'great writer as countercultural hero.'

Kraus reconstitutes Acker's wanderings with real wit and beauty, understanding without pandering to the painfully high stakes of her identity games

To pin down the real Kathy Acker then is a self-defeating task but Chris Kraus's biography of her is a brilliant and necessary thing. Kraus pushes Acker's writing to the foreground making us understand how difficult a territory the so-called avant-garde was, and is, for a woman.

'To lie is to try,' Chris Kraus writes in this examination of the various personae of Kathy Acker, the fucked-up girl from high school who, through lying and trying, became an experimental writer of rare courage and vision. In some ways a contemporary and in some ways as far off as the days when people moved to New York and San Francisco for the cheap rent, Acker needed a key, and Chris Kraus provides it.

Chris Kraus's After Acker sets the bar for what will surely be a new era of critical and biographical reckoning with the life and work of Kathy Acker. Kraus had a ringside seat, has done her homework, and here provides a substantive effort to pay homage not only to the complex, singular, raucous, and crucial writer and human that Acker was, but also to the constellation of artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers who were her friends, lovers, inspirations, and fellow makers of history.

Hardly anyone writes better or more insightfully than Chris Kraus about the lives of women and artists. After Kathy Acker is an intense, riveting portrait of a writer who was raw and savvy, fragile and brilliant, whose self-deceptions were inseparable from her greatness. Quotes from her profane and passionate journals reveal Kathy the crazy poet, the bad girlfriend, the Upper East Side schoolgirl, the downtown writer, Kathy in love and in denial. Gossipy, sexy, tragic, terrific.

Neel Mukherjee shows himself to be one of those contemporary authors who invites readers to make connections between seemingly disparate story strands… Combined with Mukherjee’s rich realisation of the novel’s individual elements, this indeterminacy makes A State of Freedom a powerful, memorable treatment of a theme too often reduced to uninvolving didacticism

The beauty of Mukherjee’s prose sucks the reader into an alternative world, where misery, deprivation and the struggle to exist another day are normal

Mukherjee… homes in on the restless, the disinherited, the socially trapped… Mercilessly observant, he does not spare the reader but leavens scenes of savagery, squalor and despair with moments of rainbow vividness, all the more striking for the muddy, cacophonous backdrop from which they are brought forth… In a significant and porous work, Mukherjee gives congruence and visibility to these fractured, hidden lives

He does what good novelists should, which is to hold up a mirror to society and remind people that what passes for normal is often barbaric. His quiet observation is effective – and damning

Set in contemporary India, technically daring, deeply compassionate, it’s a powerful, pertinent novel about migration and social injustice

Each story is intimate and universal, concrete and elusive… A State of Freedom is ambitious, and it succeeds on all levels

Narrated with the precise realism that we have come to expect of Neel Mukherjee’s novels… A State of Freedom resonates with intricate and disturbing echoes… Mukherjee has created an India that is always graspable and always elusive

In Mukherjee’s hands familiar fare is elevated by his empathy for the poor and the journalistic efforts he undertakes to understand them… his best work yet… This bleak and entirely justified vision of modern India is what binds together Mukherjee’s stories and indeed his oeuvre

A compelling read set in contemporary India that explores the attempts of five characters, each in different circumstances, to exchange the life they are leading for something better

A brilliant novel, deeply compassionate and painterly, reminding me of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings. Mukherjee brings to life the colours and sounds of a place where modern life is constantly crashing against tradition

Bleak and beautifully written

Mukherjee’s characters are so well drawn and their plights so affecting that we stop quibbling over how to categorise the book and simply lose ourselves in masterful storytelling… Random bouts of cruelty… unfold in electrifying prose

Very powerful, very well written

A thing of wonder… does what a great novel should do… one of the most wonderful novels I’ve read for ages and ages… such wonderful high calibre writing’

Brilliant… I couldn’t put it down…everything about it rang true… so gripping, so thrilling

A splendidly rich and affirmative novel

An especially searing account of state oppression and Communist terror… everything is held together by Mukherjee’s wonderfully inventive prose style

An exceptional portrait of modern India – and one of the best novels this year

Mukherjee confronts us with the deranged performances of both master and slave… A State of Freedom’s artfully handled piecing together of story fragments is held in tension by a counterforce of textual disintegration

This novel paints a vivid picture of modern India, its beauty and its benightedness, examining the relationship between identity and migration. Mukherjee is pitch-perfect in his descriptions of Indian life and unsparing in chronicling the poverty, deprivation and superstition that blights the nation. The book’s themes are important and the writing powerful, in places shocking

Harsh and vibrant… Mukherjee’s deep knowledge of India and the West, allied to his never-failing curiosity about the ties that both bind us and separate us, makes him an outstanding chronicler of Bengali life, seen from within and without… In an age when so many fiction writers flimflam around in a cloud of unknowing, Mukherjee has an eagle’s eye for the truth

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

[Segal's] descriptions are spare and unerring; everyday family interactions are observed warmly and yet with precision

Evans' writing is like water; her sentences ebb and flow and change course, mirroring the Thames as it wends its way in and around the characters' lives

A masterpiece of modern living

An amazing book full of wisdom and empathy

An immersive look into friendship, parenthood, sex, and grief - as well as the fragility of love. It is told with such detail, you're left wanting more

Beautifully written and observed

Evans is extraordinarily good on the minutiae of grief, family, and the fragility of love

a lyrical portrait of modern London