An interestingly wayward memoir, exploring […] the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack

A great father-son memoir, and a good book about horses, too

You needn’t love horses to find this idiosyncratic memoir a joy

This is desperately sad, life-affirming and just about wonderful. It is the book every father would want his son to write about him

As a memoir, an elegy and a piece of investigative journalism, it dazzles

Iridescent

Amply researched and gracefully told

Sullivan has found the transcendent in the house

Bracingly eccentric…Sullivan is a remarkable writer

It's a good, funny, moving book... [Sullivan] is unfailingly good company, always curious, often very funny

Sullivan knows how to craft a paragraph and tell a story

Reads as what it is: a great first book

This morning Blood Horses showed up in the post. It’s Sullivan’s first book, a memoir about his late sportswriter father as well as a study of equine racing and breeding and obsessing over. We’re only 30 pages in but we’re convinced Sullivan wins it by a length and then some. He’s the best thing to come out of the south since 2 Chainz

A truly fascinating and brilliantly written memoir recounting Sullivan’s relationship with his writer father but also a detailed examination of horse racing, the love of his father’s life, as well as an entire treatise on the relationship between man and horse

Blood Horses blends history, reportage and personal essay. The book is an excellent example of the mixed form that the critic Northrop Frye once called an “anatomy”. [Sullivan’s] enthusiasm rubs off

Brilliant, sometimes maddeningly discursive memoir… Sullivan writes beautifully. Blood Horses makes better reading than the smoothly finished works of less witty and accomplished writers

All the elegance and craft [Sullivan] displayed in [Pulphead] are present once again

Luminous, hard-to-characterise book... By the sheer fizzing excellence of his writing [Sullivan] carries off the difficult task he set himself triumphantly

It’s a daring approach combining memoir and reportage and, beneath it all, the autobiographical theme of his attempt to understand his father, but it works magnificently

An obvious choice, ultimately. A book that went beyond entertainment or education in their normal senses. This is the book that opened the world's eyes to the incredible doping scandal in cycling and the crimes of Lance Armstrong. A book that will be on almost all awards lists for books this year, and will surely migrate to the lists of all-time great books as its impact becomes more apparent over time.

Explosive... a stunning and sometimes sickening account of the doping pervasive in the pro peloton.

Haunting... takes readers deep inside the gory cult of back-alley phlebotomy that ruled cycling as Armstrong launched and nurtured his Livestrong brand.

Rich, magisterial account...Other books on Hemingway have tended to focus on his post-1930s literary decline and his machismo. The portrait that emerges from these pages is altogether more human

He has a tremendous feel for Hemingway, as both writer and man

This is a portrait of the author which is likely to leave one feeling more warmly disposed towards him

More a portrait than a biography, this book is a dazzling late example of "New Journalism"...the result is touching, revelatory and utterly absorbing

Unmissable

While much of Hemingway’s life may have been hellish, Hendrickson’s writing is a delight. A fine work

Very well told

An album of fascinating snapshots of Hemingway

Paul Hendrickson writes with a great deal of passion…

A terrific and fresh approach to the man