One of the great Russian autobiographies, as fresh now as the day it was written - and the day it was lived

Outstanding... A sparkling, supremely precious literary achievement

The Story of a Life radiates a terrific vim and thirst for experience. A more gloriously life-affirming book is unlikely to emerge this year.

Beautifully translated, these volumes are a uniquely rich and moving account of events that continue to haunt us to this day

A 20th-century masterpiece

A literary masterpiece.... This is not the cracker-barrel blandness of some professional sage, as so often in America's ghost-written memoirs, but a wisdom of tragic insight and of hard-earned integrity

A work of astonishing beauty ... a masterpiece

For Paustovsky, books are like stars in the darkness, and "literature draws us closer to the golden age of our thoughts, our feelings and our actions". He was, unquestionably, a part of that golden age, and now with this lively new translation of his memoir, he can be again

An older man, a survivor, and a witness, Paustovsky writes against time, to tell the young what the past was like... His work is nothing like an elegy, nor is it as routine as a backward glance at the good or bad old days. It is, rather, a series of sketches, stories, novellas, in which vanished people (including the author's young self) are present again - as they once walked in a park, or smiled, or wept - and made anew in man's most endurable medium, language

The quality of his [Paustovsky's] narrative imagination make The Story of a Life, the Proust-length autobiography he started in 1943, a masterpiece

Excellent... Smith ably captures the unaffected simplicity and Tristram Shandy-like discursiveness of Paustovsky's prose...to create a teeming portrait of early 20th-century Russia... The Story of a Life radiates a terrific vim and thirst for experience. A more gloriously life-affirming book is unlikely to emerge this year

In Douglas Smith's revelatory new translation of the first three volumes, late imperial Russia and Ukraine, the Revolution and the Civil War are observed with astounding clarity and originality... Smith's limpid and outstandingly readable translation finally captures this unique voice, and should assure Konstantin Paustovsky's monumental autobiography a substantial new readership

This is generally considered his greatest work and the translation is both accurate and stylistically immaculate

Konstantin Paustovsky could tell a good story. This lively new translation of the first three volumes of his memoir...is delightful proof

It is no easy task to get a group biography just right, but the authors succeed in bringing the reader elegantly along their overlapping journeys of discovery and friendship... Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a masterly account of their philosophy and their friendship

An utterly eye-opening and enthralling debut, clearly laying out our uniquely British obsession with nostalgia. Required reading for anyone who wants to use the term 'culture war'... I absolutely loved it

A smart, entertaining and meticulously researched backwards look (quite literally) at Britain's history of looking over its shoulder. Deconstructs the lure of the fictitious 'good old days' and how they have been weaponised throughout history. Excellent

Outstanding. A thrilling, elegant and highly original interrogation of how we use our pasts

Nostalgia was once considered a terminal condition. Hannah Woods suggests that the culture needs to book itself in for a check-up. Provocative and well-argued, Rule, Nostalgia offers the diagnosis that might lead us to a cure

A triumphal backwards tour through the history of Britain's relationship with its own past. This funny, sad, wise and brilliantly informative book is a crash course in the many pasts that have made our presents

Rule, Nostalgia is radiant with an enthusiast's passion for their subject, and makes a convincing case that Britain's history is sufficiently weird, fascinating and marvellous, without rewriting it into comforting fables

Rule, Nostalgia is a triumphal backwards tour through the history of Britain's relationship with its own past, a chronicle of our state of perpetual longing for a paradise just gone. Woods' eye is ironic, but never without sympathy as she teases apart the nested structures of mourning and nostalgia on which out national identity is built. This funny, sad, wise and brilliantly informative book is both a plea for historiographical literacy and a crash course in the many pasts that have made our presents

Bold and original, with a cool intelligence, and so very truthful about the colonialist structure of British society: how it has poisoned even our language, making its necessary dismantling almost the stuff of dreams. I take hope from Assembly, not just for our literature but also for our slow awakening

Mind-bending and utterly original. It's like Thomas Bernhard in the key of Rachel Cusk but about black subjectivity

Brilliantly sharp and curiously Alice-like... It centres on a gifted and driven young Black woman navigating a topsy-turvy and increasingly maddening modern Britain... Her indictment is forensic, clear, elegant, a prose-polished looking glass held up to her not-so-post-colonial nation. Only one puzzle remains unsolved: how a novel so slight can bear such weight

A piercing, cautionary tale about the costs of assimilating into a society still in denial about its colonial past. Brown writes with the deftness and insight of a poet

Bold, elegant, and all the more powerful for its brevity, Assembly captures the sickening weightlessness which a Black British woman, who has been obedient to and complicit with the capitalist system, experiences as she makes life-changing decisions under the pressure of the hegemony

This is a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation

One of the most talked-about debuts of the year . . . you'll read it in one sitting

Thrilling... Brown gets straight to the point. With delivery as crisp and biting into an apple, she short-circuits expectation... This is [the narrator's] story, and she will tell it how she wishes, unpicking convention and form. Like The Drivers' Seat by Muriel Spark, it's thrilling to see a protagonist opting out and going her own way

A nuanced, form-redefining exploration on class, work, gender and race

Across 100 lean pages, Brown deftly handles a gigantic literary heritage... Her style rivals the best contemporary modernists, like Eimear McBride and Rachel Cusk; innocuous or obscure on a first reading, punching on a second... Assembly is only the start

There's something of Isherwood in Brown's spare, illuminating prose... A series of jagged-edged shards that when accumulated form an unhappy mirror in which modern Britain might examine itself

A debut novel as slender and deadly as an adder

A razor-sharp debut... This powerful short novel suggests meaningful discussion of race is all but impossible if imperialism's historical violence remains taboo

Bold, spare, agonisingly well-observed. An impressive debut

Excoriating, unstoppable... The simplicity of the narrative allows complexity in the form: over barely a hundred pages, broken into prose fragments that have been assembled with both care and mercilessness

Beguiling and beautifully written, this is the work of an author with a bright future

Coruscating originality, emotional potency, astonishing artistic vim... This signals the arrival of a truly breathtaking literary voice... A scintillating tour de force

Fierce and accomplished, Assembly interrogates the high cost of surviving in a system designed to exclude you

I was blown away by Assembly, an astonishing book that forces us to see what's underpinning absolutely everything

Coiled and charged, a small shockwave... Sometimes you come across a short novel of such compressed intensity that you wonder why anyone would bother reading longer narratives... [Assembly] casts a huge shadow

A masterwork . . . it contains centuries of wisdom, aesthetic experimentation and history. Brown handles her debut with a surgeon's control and a musician's sensitivity to sound

An extraordinary book, and a compelling read that had me not only gripped but immediately determined to listen again... Highly recommended

'As utterly, urgently brilliant as everyone has said. A needle driven directly into the sclerotic heart of contemporary Britain. Beautiful proof that you don't need to write a long book, just a good book'

Every line of this electrifying debut novel pulses with canny social critique

Devastatingly eloquent, bold, poignant

An achievement that will leave you wondering just how it's possible that this is only the author's very first work... Brown packs so much commentary and insight inside of every single sentence... Original and startling all at once. After reading Assembly, I cannot wait to see what Natasha Brown does next

[Brown's] work is like that of an excellent photographer - you feel like you are finally seeing the world sharply and without the common filters. That is hypnotising

A brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment