A perfectly wonderful writer

Margery Allingham has precious few peers and no superiors

One of the finest “golden age” crime novelists

Miss Allingham has a strong, well controlled sense of humour, a power of suggesting character with a few touches and an excellent English style. She has a sense of the fantastic, and is never dull

A mesmerising, knuckle-clenching read

Winningly compulsive, brilliantly conceived

Garland's prose is stunningly lucid. Addictive and compelling

A highly confident debut...this incisive novel may well come to be regarded as a defining text in the history of imaginative travel writing

Alex Garland is writing a brand new kind of adventure novel. His style is dangerously simple yet altogether captivating

An exceptional first novel...An action novel that provokes subtle responses, The Beach takes in ideas about man's inevitable progress from noble savage to social breakdown (and) the related tradition of nature versus art

Garland has written a powerful and frighteningly believable novel

Precise and speedy prose, with good old-fashioned romantic adventure spiced up with deadpan authorial irony

The Woman in Cabin 10 is a deliciously compulsive read. At once up-to-the-minute and timeless, it blends classic suspense writing with twenty-first-century twists and turns. A book to keep you reading late into the night and leave your mind and pulse racing long after the final page

A compelling thriller… It gave me nightmares – but only in the way a juicy thriller ought to do.

All the glamour of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with a titanic dose of intrigue and mystery… fast and addictive and will keep you guessing until the very end

A dark and gripping thriller that will enchant readers

A tense, twisty delight that powers along at a heart rattling pace

Agatha Christie-style whodunit… With a flawed but likeable heroine, and a fast moving plot, it makes for a stylish thriller.

[An] engrossing holiday read.

I was absolutely gripped the whole way through the book, and I couldn't go to sleep until I found out how it ended! I definitely recommend it!

If you know someone that loved Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train then this is certainly the book for them. This was a holiday read for me a few months back and it really gripped me.

If you like your thrillers pacy, intriguing and well handled, then The Woman in Cabin 10is a good option… A catchy, captivating mystery.

Moshfegh’s writings stands out in several spectacular ways... In detail and texture the world she creates is unsettlingly vivid: a considerable achievement for a writer born so long after the era she depicts…. Eileen's anger and frustration dominate her story, helping to create a seamless mood of menace... Moshfegh's debut novel is set to attain classic status within the thriller genre.

An impressive character study full of subtle nuances, shrouded in mystery.

Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel… Moshfegh’s control of tone and pace is masterly, her ventriloquism impeccable, and the period detail unobtrusively spot-on. I was occasionally reminded of Nabokov and Lena Dunham, among others, but her voice is her own, and immensely promising.

Moshfegh’s fine, clear, short sentences carry complex thought and emotional revelation effortlessly.

Moshfegh’s boldness is admirable.

Moshfegh is a rising star… Eileen, her expertly paced debut novel concerns a dowdy prison clerk who lives with her gin-soaked father… Moshfegh delivers a thumping finish, leaving the reader dumbstruck by her sly, wicked storytelling genius.

A conspicuous nomination as a new voice. The cult following Moshfegh has amassed in only four short years, with steady championing by the Paris Review.

It reminded me of Lolita... Dark and fierce.

Moshfegh is, without a doubt, a very, very good writer… There’s lots of these wonderful moments. Moshfegh’s writing is at its most compelling and chilling when she delicately and intricately weaves the most finely spun…of spiders webs around her readers head… Eileen is a pretty brilliant debut novel.

Moshfegh’s exploration of deep and lasting emotional damage is quite brilliant.

A dazzling, original novel with nourish flourishes voiced by a wickedly sardonic narrator’

The Man Booker shortlist has just been announced… Our favourite is Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh.

The character of Eileen is fascinating and Moshfegh’s creation is the reason this has made the longlist. Naive, unpredictable and able to elicit responses from sympathy to revulsion from the reader but throughout you will her to get her life back on track and escape both the prison she works in and the one she has created for herself. I would be very happy to see this on the shortlist.

This is eerie, Hitchcockian and refreshingly original.

Sex, death, revenge and abuse run like dark currents beneath every page and come together in a brilliantly sustained denouement in which all the novel’s motifs…cohere and resonate.

A striking and ingenious work… She elevates Eileen from mediocrity to magnificence, in a feat that is nothing short of miraculous… The mark of reading a true master of suspense… Demands to be reread… At once chilling, ambitious and unexpected, Eileen is undoubtedly deserving of its Booker Prize nomination, and, dare I say it, of a win.

[It is] gripping… The writing is brilliant.

A very dark, morbid tale… I loved it, because it’s a really original voice that draws you into a dark psychology.

A clever, eloquent and captivating debut novel.

[It is] thrillingly playful.

The most grimly compelling fiction came from a new voice: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Man Booker-shortlisted Eileen. It takes nerve to create such a thoroughly dislikeable narrator… It is like someone reaching into a bottomless bag of gifts.

I loved its refreshingly dark and complicated protagonist and grubbily vivid sense of time and place. Eileen reads like a smart, feminist take on Hitchcock or Highsmith and was, for that reason, impossible to put down.

[Eileenis] compulsively deviant and utterly delicious… I savoured every single word of it.