Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts

Hopefully, thanks to Gallagher, every small, vital nuance, every moving observation, each choice of word as Carver wrote it, is there to be seen; that is why Carver cared enough to begin setting it right, and others have now finished the task

An extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart

The most interesting book of the year

an extraordinary book, and probably the most influential story collection of the past 30 years

a landmark book, full of surprises.

Lish may have helped put Carver on the map of the American short story, but the writer made himself its capital city.

His style is fearsome: remorselessly spare and precise yet so sharply nuanced that the ordinary people he writes about are exposed in all their messy, emotional weakness...Pure pleasure to read on its own, it is also fascinating to compare against the Lish version.

Here, for the first time, we can read the original versions. They are very good.

These vignettes remain tremendously distinctive and their characters' generally doomed attempts to keep their hope alive "in the world of men - where defeat and death are more the natural order of things" are wry and touching. Carver's landscapes of motels, "negroes" and "longhairs" are documents from another era, but they are grubby, flawed little gems that still fascinate.

The surprise is that despite Carver's well-earned reputation for spare, grainy prose that dipped into the hard-bitten lives of his characters, these stories have a richness of texture that complements Carver's austerity of tone. Lish seems to have flattened Carver's style, rather than sharpening it, and the tales in Beginners demonstrate just how great a writer Carver was

A precocious talent.

Ambiguous gender roles, grotesque situations and the whiff of decay hanging over The Shore – brilliantly imagined through the stench of chicken factories – lend a southern Gothic feel to the writing. There are sections of brutal realism, magic realism and speculative fiction. Other dystopias come to mind, notably David Mitchell’s time-hopping epic Cloud Atlas, but also Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its themes of sexually transmitted plagues and subjugation of women.

A haunting and staggering debut novel, this is a multi-layered exploration of redneck Virginia through the eyes of its women.

An impressive debut novel

An original new voice in fiction

Lyrical writing and quietly tragic storytelling

A really promising debut . . . the beauty of it is astounding . . . enchanting.

[A] savage yet hyper-readable debut … [a] harrowing, high-octane novel.

This is not a novel for the faint-hearted but dare to read it for the sinuous fluency of the writing.

This is an outstanding book, one that makes the reader pause and take stock. It is unsettling, challenging and yet beautiful – made all the more so by the author’s pared back language and careful evocation of the land, marshes, oyster beds and crabs, and the miseries and small joys of island life … this is an extraordinary beginning to a literary career.

A superb first novel . . . [it is] a significant achievement to produce a book of this quality . . . [there is] a wonderful sense of place.

Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and just as ambitious

An impressive debut.

Already on the longlist for the Baileys Prize, this is an island story told in daisy-chain sequence, a series of succinct vignettes that come together as a vivid portrait of the Shore itself, until you can almost smell the salt air and the stench of slaughtered chicken.

Some extraordinary images . . . a wonderful first novel.

Taylor’s prose is dreamy and surprisingly playful.

A wonderful read.

Exuberant, magical and incredibly ambitious, but Sara Taylor pulls it off with style.

Taylor shows a special affinity with the lives of women that makes for a powerful debut