Full of drama, romance and the thrill of dancing, this [is a] heartwarming and uplifting story

Anyone who recalls dancing at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom during their summer holidays will love this latest romance.

We are completely transported in this delightful, escapist read

Chang makes a spell rise from every wound, and I'm caught all the way up in this magic... one of the best emerging writers out there.

K-Ming Chang's prose ravishes, ravages, rampages. This is an absolute lightning strike of a debut. The world grew brighter as I read it.

Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel-about multiple generations of Taiwanese-American women in Arkansas whose lives are imbued with cultural and familial myth-is utterly alive.

The poet K-Ming Chang's debut novel, Bestiary, offers up a different kind of narrative, full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter - and all the things in between.

What gives me fuel are other books - anything stylish and/or dirty. This year I loved reading K-Ming Chang's Bestiary.

To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor. Hers is a dizzyingly imaginative, sharp-witted voice queering migration, adolescence, and questions of family and belonging in totally new and unexpected ways. Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!

Epic and intimate at once, Bestiary brings myth to visceral life, showing what becomes of women and girls who carry tigers, birds, and fish within. K-Ming Chang's talent exposes what is hidden inside us. She makes magic on the page.

[A] vivid, fabulist debut . . . the prose is full of imagery. Chang's wild story of a family's tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.

Fierce and funny, full of magic and grit, Bestiary is the most searching exploration of love and belonging I've read in a long time. Family, immigrant, queer, magic realist-none of these tags can quite capture the energy of this startling novel, which is all of those things, yet somehow more. K-Ming Chang has created something truly remarkable.

Bestiary is crafted at the scale of epic poetry: origin stories that feel at once gravely older than their years, yet viscerally contemporary. Chang knows well that the life of a family-marriage, immigration, queer coming-of-age-can so often feel like a wild and tender myth, being spun and unspun by its members, again and again. These are fables I wish I'd had growing up.

Told by many voices, Bestiary is a queer, transnational fairy tale whose irresistible heroine is a Taiwanese American baby dyke. Written in a prose style as inventive and astonishing as the story it tells, to read it is to enter a world where the female body possesses enormous power, where the borders between generations are porous and shifting. A worthy heir to Maxine Hong Kingston, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Jamaica Kincaid, K-Ming Chang is a woman warrior for the 21st century-part oracle, part witness, all heart.

This book astounded me, unsettled me, and left me envious of K-Ming Chang's talent. Bestiary is a gleaming, meticulously crafted gem. I could spend all day marvelling at Chang's prose; these are sentences you want to climb inside, relish, and read again and again just for the pleasure of the language.

K-Ming Chang is ferociously talented, one of my favorite new writers. She understands the language of desire and secrecy. Here is a book so wise; so gripping; so mythical and dangerous; so infused with surreal beauty, it burns to be read, and read again.

An illuminating celebration of female artists and their often overlooked place in history

Passionate, enthusiastic and witty... I wish I had had this book as a teenager

A touchpoint for a new generation who will go on to define the future of those exhibitions, collections, and auctions

This eye-opening read is an overdue revisionist history of art - ignoring the pale, male canon to celebrate female artists who have been overlooked for centuries

The early centuries are thin simply due to the paucity of surviving work by talented women painters but her story becomes fuller and more persuasive the closer it gets to today. Hessel is clear-sighted and impartial enough not to over-claim for her subjects but show that they are full of interest and every bit as worthy of attention as their male peers.

Katy Hessel's first book The Story of Art without Men is a necessary and urgent book. A truly empowering title, the volume celebrates the rise of women artists and recentres them within art, political and social history. Many of these artists have been presented at Serpentine and their visions are getting the visibility they deserve through the fantastic visuals and Katy's thorough research

When women are literally written out of history, Hessel conveys how radical, powerful and vulnerable their lives and art were - and still are. Through moments of rage and celebration, this story fundamentally centres creative freedom: the stifling of it, and the lengths endured to claim it.

This passionate and personal telling of what has been an invisible history will bring revelation to anyone entering the world of art and its histories.

Although women have always made art, for far too long, art history has been told as the story of male achievement. Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men is a brilliantly readable and lively corrective. Outraged and celebratory, it's chock-full of female trail-blazers - from the Renaissance until the present day - who forged their way, despite facing the kind of hurdles that would stump most mortals

Compiled with zip and wit, even the informed reader will learn something new on every page - we really cannot recommend it enough

A sumptuously illustrated history... at once broad in scope and meticulously researched

This book has blown my mind. Really passionately recommend

An extraordinary eye-opener, and very readable ... we badly need books like Hessel's

Hessel's beautifully written 500-year survey is a welcome, necessary, addition to the bookshelves

Highly readable and lavishly illustrated... a rich storehouse of groundbreaking female art

Astonishing

This book changes everything. As soon as you open it, it's like you've opened a box of lit fireworks - out soars great artist after great artist. Her retake on the canon has changed it forever

Hessel possesses that rare quality of a public intellectual, whereby she can distill vast amounts of knowledge and history into something accessible, relevant and joyful

Extraordinary

Honest, wholesome entertainment

Utterly addictive

Exquisite writing and a story enriched by the power of abiding love

Full of romance, drama and snappy dialogue

Eminently readable and richly imagined

Hilarious and romantic. I couldn't put it down