A fine, fierce, incandescent talent

Burning Your Boats brings together her four volumes of short fiction...They testify to Carter's range, daring and her invention. An important book

A writer cultured in every sense of the word, whose syntax is ever artful, whose vocabulary is zestfully arcane, whose erudition manifests itself in her work in a shimmering play of parody and illusion. She was one of the century's best writers, and her stories are among her finest works

This is the voice the young generation are flocking to read and study, and these marvellous collected stories wonderfully explain why no pigeon-hole could ever contain her creator. When you read all the stories collected together, a sense of joy erupts that such writing can exist

World-class stories, woven from their author's high humour, glittering imagination, vital erudition and warm intelligence

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