Bargain Hunt is a right bobby-dazzler

Ramirez blasts a powerful spotlight into the so-called Dark Ages and reveals a vibrant world, awash with colour and character.

A wonderful book

Entertaining ... carefully composed

Those who were recast as saints achieved a superhuman status, their real lives often obscured by hagiographies rich with legends of miracle-working from beyond the grave. Janina Ramirez's book portrays them historically – as living, breathing personalities within the world they knew, the places we have inherited. Her enthusiasm and instinct for relevance should welcome a broad new audience to medieval Church history.

Hay makes the most of a vivid period in English and especially London history. Her carefully poised study puts Johnson, today an obscure figure, back at the centre of his circle

A beautifully packaged, skilfully written and detailed book that finally gives this gentle revolutionary the recognition he deserves

Chronicling Johnson's fascinating dining companions and the changes that rocked Britain during the period, this is a feast for those interested in the 18th century

Marvellous... The list of [Joseph Johnson's] guests reads like a who's who revolutionary politics and culture: abolitionist MPs, Jacobin agents, pioneering scientists and radical preachers... Panoramic and kaleidoscopic

It makes little sense to approach a character of such extensive and various connections as the bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson other than via the clubbable sort of method at which Daisy Hay has already proven herself adept... In Dinner with Joseph Johnson, she has again broadened her scope... Hay pursues lines of enquiry with patience and sensitivity to detail

Highly original . . . engagingly candid [and] thought-provoking

I loved this luminous, radical book about bodies in time. It is a deeply personal history, that simultaneously brings medieval myth and poetry to breathing, bleeding life. An education for the mind and the heart

Fiercely smart, strange, surprising

Extremely intriguing . . . I found myself completely absorbed. Fascinating

Everything is illuminated, magnified, revisioned: sexual desire, motherhood, family. Her writing is unorthodox, unnerving, and very exciting

An outstanding achievement. Fierce Appetites defies easy categorization, is brilliantly written and simply deserves to be read

I absolutely loved this utterly original book. Immersing myself in Elizabeth Boyle's considerable brain was a true privilege, and the way she uses medieval narratives to unpick her own present was endlessly surprising and beautiful. I read it in two sittings, devouring her perspective on life, love, loss

[A] marvellous, astonishing, funny, moving, wise, reflective, deeply scholarly, fascinating book

All twelve essays are freighted with that fierceness the title trumpets

This book is extraordinary . . . a wonderful work of women's memoir

There's been a swell of books about the former German Democratic Republic this year, but this chunky tome might be the best. Historian Hoyer blends large-scale political insights with engaging personal stories

Katja Hoyer’s history of East Germany infuses history with memoir to tell a story of country that will surprise many of us by holding up facts to our prejudices about the place. Through political, economic and social history, Beyond the Wall presents an East Germany that was not as backward as most thought and one that, for all its repression, offered some economic security that today’s east Germans might feel they lack

Katja Hoyer's monumentally successful history of the GDR is a call to restore the history of East Germany to the mainstream of German modern history ... a feast of vignettes and anecdotes, it is a genuine pleasure to read

Beyond the Wall recreates vividly what it was like to live under communist rule behind the Iron Curtain. Fascinating and wholly original

Through interviews and personal experience, Katja Hoyer brings a new understanding to a country that has now vanished ... A fresh look at what life was like for average people in East Germany ... intriguing and surprising

With Beyond the Wall, Katja Hoyer confirms her place as one of the best young historians writing in English today. On the heels of her superb Blood and Iron, about the rise and fall of the Second Reich, comes another masterpiece, this one about the aftermath of the Third Reich in the East. Well-researched, well-written and profoundly insightful, it explodes many of the lazy Western cliches about East Germany

Utterly brilliant. This gripping account of East Germany sheds new light on what for many of us remains an opaque chapter of history. Authoritative, lively and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-WW2 Europe

A gripping and nuanced history of the GDR from its beginnings as a separate German socialist state against the wishes of Stalin to its final rapprochement with its Western other against those of Gorbachev. Beyond the Wall is a unique fresco of everyday reality in East Germany. Elegantly moving between diplomatic history, political economy and cultural analysis, this is an essential read to understand not only the life and death of the GDR but also the parts of it that still survive in the emotions of its former citizens.

Superb, totally fascinating and compelling, Katja Hoyer's first full history of East Germany's rise and fall is a work of revelatory original research - and a gripping read with a brilliant cast of characters. Essential reading

A beyond-brilliant new picture of the rise and fall of the East German state. Katja Hoyer gives us not only pin-sharp historical analysis, but an up-close and personal view of both key characters and ordinary citizens whose lives charted some of the darkest hours of the Cold War. If you thought you knew the history of East Germany, think again. An utterly riveting read

A fantastic, sparkling book, filled with insights not only about East Germany but about the Cold War, Europe and the forging of the 20th and 21st centuries

The joke has it that the duty of the last East German to escape from the country was to turn off the lights. In Beyond the Wall Katja Hoyer turns the light back on and gives us the best kind of history: frank, vivid, nuanced and filled with interesting people

A refreshing and eye-opening book on a country that is routinely reduced to cartoonish cliché. Beyond the Wall is a tribute to the ordinary East Germans who built themselves a society that - for a time - worked for them, a society carved out of a state founded in the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism

A colourful and often revelatory re-appraisal of one of modern history's most fascinating political curiosities. Katja Hoyer skilfully weaves diverse political and private lives together, from the communist elite to ordinary East Germans

Katja Hoyer is becoming the authoritative voice in the English speaking world for all things German. Thanks to her, German history has the prominence in the Anglosphere it certainly deserves.

Katja Hoyer brilliantly shows that the history of East Germany was a significant chapter of German history, not just a footnote to it or a copy of the Soviet Union. To understand Germany today we have to grapple with the history and legacy of its all but dismissed East

Katja Hoyer's return to discover what happened to her homeland - the old East Germany - is an excellent counterpoint to Stasiland by Anna Funder

Beguiling and beautifully written, this is the work of an author with a bright future

Coruscating originality, emotional potency, astonishing artistic vim... This signals the arrival of a truly breathtaking literary voice... A scintillating tour de force

Fierce and accomplished, Assembly interrogates the high cost of surviving in a system designed to exclude you

I was blown away by Assembly, an astonishing book that forces us to see what's underpinning absolutely everything

Coiled and charged, a small shockwave... Sometimes you come across a short novel of such compressed intensity that you wonder why anyone would bother reading longer narratives... [Assembly] casts a huge shadow

A masterwork . . . it contains centuries of wisdom, aesthetic experimentation and history. Brown handles her debut with a surgeon's control and a musician's sensitivity to sound

An extraordinary book, and a compelling read that had me not only gripped but immediately determined to listen again... Highly recommended

'As utterly, urgently brilliant as everyone has said. A needle driven directly into the sclerotic heart of contemporary Britain. Beautiful proof that you don't need to write a long book, just a good book'

Every line of this electrifying debut novel pulses with canny social critique

Devastatingly eloquent, bold, poignant

An achievement that will leave you wondering just how it's possible that this is only the author's very first work... Brown packs so much commentary and insight inside of every single sentence... Original and startling all at once. After reading Assembly, I cannot wait to see what Natasha Brown does next

[Brown's] work is like that of an excellent photographer - you feel like you are finally seeing the world sharply and without the common filters. That is hypnotising

A brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment