Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life

This riproaring, full-bodied riff on sex, secrecy and family is Bernardine Evaristo's seventh book. If you don't yet know her work, you should - she says things about modern Britain that no one else does

Transforms our often narrow perceptions of gay men in England . . . Comical, agonising and, ultimately, moving

Evaristo has a lot going on in this unusual urban romance, but beneath her careful study of race and sexuality is a beautiful love story. Not many writers could have two old men having sexual intercourse in a bedsit to a soundtrack of Shabba Ranks's Mr Loverman and save it from bad taste, much less make it sublime. But the hero of this book, and his canny creator, make everything taste just fine

An undeniably bold and energetic writer, whose world view is anything but one-dimensional

Audacious genre-bending, in-yer-face wit and masterly retellings of underwritten corners of history are the hallmarks of Evaristo's wit

Heartbreaking yet witty, this is a story that needed to be told

I loved this novel. Barrington is flamboyant, complex and in love with his childhood friend Morris. It really makes you think of all the stories, forbidden and forgotten, from the elders who made England their home

A strikingly alert and humane profile of migrant labour... wild and beautiful and full of woe

Vivid, original and always engaging

This is a humane and moving account of the migrant experience in contemporary London, full of understanding and compassion about the difficulties of alienation and belonging

Here, as in her best work, Tremain achieves a remarkable synthesis of fully realised character and the systematic observation of a world.The Road Home is a subtle and challenging account of a story we think we know already and of a person we all too often reduce to nothing more than a political issue or a statistic.

Rose Tremain is a novelist of style, ambition and lyrical sensibility...This is a generous, sweet-tempered book

A magnificent achievement from a writer at the height of her very considerable powers

Rose Tremain is an old-fashioned writer, in the best of ways: we care about her characters' sorrows and hope for their happiness

Tremain allows us to see our country's wonders and failings as if for the first time

A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy

Cool, disturbing, it deals with emotionally fraught material. Mackintosh traffics in ambivalence and ambiguity... What Calla really wants, the author shows us, isn't necessarily a baby; it's an answer

A spare, haunting tale of autonomy and free will

Both claustrophobic and expansive, dream-like and heart-stoppingly tense. You will want to languish in its world for a very long time

This book left me breathless - it is gloriously subversive in its exploration of motherhood and desire. I'll be pressing it on everyone

Strange and luminous, spare and precise... A thrilling exploration of what it means to follow one's own longing to the point of destruction and beyond

Utterly exquisite - clever and brilliant and heartbreaking. From the dusty road to the salving forest, I absolutely adored it

Chilling, haunting, heartbreaking... Mackintosh brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel... A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women's rage

A dreamlike exploration of free will and desire

A must for Handmaid's Tale aficionados

Powerful, Ishiguro-esque... Sophie Mackintosh lays bare many of the fears and realities that face any society's women as they contemplate when their choices begin, and where they might end

Told with ragged prose that catches the breath, [Blue Ticket] articulates the irrepressible desires and wounds that can lie deep within, marked by a claustrophobia that never stops pressing in from the margins. This unsettling reimagining of the anxieties and pressures around motherhood lays bare the alienation that comes when your body is not truly yours

A darkly brilliant allegory... Astute, revelatory and heartbreaking

A rich, sharp, and daring book. To read Blue Ticket is to feel so vigorously alert you can feel the world turning

Mesmerising

Mackintosh poses urgent questions about social expectations and free will that are relevant to all realities

Irresistible storytelling that slides between the present day and a mythic realm… A heady delight

The novel draws on Shakespeare and Greek legend, and is the sort of mile-a-minute adventure you can get lost in for hours without realising

[The Porpoise] confirms the sense of a gifted writer letting his talent off the leash at last… Mind-bending yet marvellously readable, it stakes Haddon’s claim to be one of the best writers in Britain right now

Haddon conveys all this with startling granularity: the stinking, seething Jacobean London traversed by the ghosts of Wilkins and Shakespeare… Haddon's novel creates, throughout, a looming sense that something very bad but not quite perceptible is in the process of unfolding: a terrible half-glimpsed fate that the characters are powerless to resist

The Porpoise begins as a page-turning thriller and soon shifts into something slippery and strange – but remains propulsive throughout

Mark Haddon’s best novel yet. The Porpoise begins as a propulsive thriller…and segues into a classical-world adventure that reinvents the story of Pericles in prose of a hallucinatory vividness

The Porpoise reworks legend with the compelling force of a thriller

[An] exquisite retelling of Shakespeare’s Pericles

Thrilling, dramatic and exquisitely written, The Porpoise combines myth and reality to enthralling effect