The four-part story of a midlife love affair that began with a long railway journey from London to Penzance, this had me gripped from the start. Suzie, played by Rosie Cavaliero, and David (Justin Edwards) were perfect: attractive, funny and frustrating in equal measures. The surrounding characters were believable, in an Alan Bennett way, and, oh, Jakeways’ writing was sublime. The punchlines, the pacing, the humanity. Just lovely

Good-humoured, deeply engaging... Brilliant... Gratifying and elucidating

Delightful... Entertaining and thought-provoking... Sittenfeld's cut-glass prose and razor-sharp observations take her work to another level

Funny and painfully true... Closing it for the last time, you feel like you're losing a new best friend

Razor-sharp... Sittenfeld's prose, which has that elusive ability to seduce you without you ever noticing The writing, is a joy to read, and her characters a joy to spend time with

Charming... this kind of novel usually gets the chick-lit tag, but with Sittenfeld there's always an edge, always a threat of something bad just around the corner

Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric... Mackintosh handles haziness deliberately and with poise, demonstrating the near impossibility of trying to articulate or rationalise maternal desire

Mackintosh writes with a language drawn from the body.... Impressionistic and haunting in equal measure

Visceral, primal, striking... This is a potent exploration of biology and agency, motherhood and childlessness, which confirms [Mackintosh] as a writer of note

Mackintosh is part of a new generation of female writers creating feminist fictions that relate uncannily to our dystopian times... [Her] fiction lives, to an unusual extent, in its musicality, in the rhythm and spareness of its sentences

For anyone currently waiting with bated breath for the new season of 'The Handmaid's Tale', Booker-longlisted author Sophie Mackintosh's new novel is a feminist dystopia to quench your thirst

A thoughtful and haunting exploration of freedom, fate and a woman's right to choose her destiny

Chilling, timely, thought-provoking

[Mackintosh] writes with an ethereal lyricism that is equally capable of fragility and violence

Blue Ticket offers a completely different angle on a familiar subject... Like all good speculative fiction, [it] reminds us of a truth in the real world

A compelling, unsettling tale... Part-horror, part thriller, and part pregnant-lesbian love story

A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy

Cool, disturbing, it deals with emotionally fraught material. Mackintosh traffics in ambivalence and ambiguity... What Calla really wants, the author shows us, isn't necessarily a baby; it's an answer

A spare, haunting tale of autonomy and free will

Both claustrophobic and expansive, dream-like and heart-stoppingly tense. You will want to languish in its world for a very long time

This book left me breathless - it is gloriously subversive in its exploration of motherhood and desire. I'll be pressing it on everyone

Strange and luminous, spare and precise... A thrilling exploration of what it means to follow one's own longing to the point of destruction and beyond

Utterly exquisite - clever and brilliant and heartbreaking. From the dusty road to the salving forest, I absolutely adored it

Chilling, haunting, heartbreaking... Mackintosh brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel... A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women's rage

A dreamlike exploration of free will and desire

A must for Handmaid's Tale aficionados

Powerful, Ishiguro-esque... Sophie Mackintosh lays bare many of the fears and realities that face any society's women as they contemplate when their choices begin, and where they might end

Told with ragged prose that catches the breath, [Blue Ticket] articulates the irrepressible desires and wounds that can lie deep within, marked by a claustrophobia that never stops pressing in from the margins. This unsettling reimagining of the anxieties and pressures around motherhood lays bare the alienation that comes when your body is not truly yours

A darkly brilliant allegory... Astute, revelatory and heartbreaking

A rich, sharp, and daring book. To read Blue Ticket is to feel so vigorously alert you can feel the world turning

Mesmerising

Mackintosh poses urgent questions about social expectations and free will that are relevant to all realities

Irresistible storytelling that slides between the present day and a mythic realm… A heady delight

The novel draws on Shakespeare and Greek legend, and is the sort of mile-a-minute adventure you can get lost in for hours without realising

[The Porpoise] confirms the sense of a gifted writer letting his talent off the leash at last… Mind-bending yet marvellously readable, it stakes Haddon’s claim to be one of the best writers in Britain right now

Haddon conveys all this with startling granularity: the stinking, seething Jacobean London traversed by the ghosts of Wilkins and Shakespeare… Haddon's novel creates, throughout, a looming sense that something very bad but not quite perceptible is in the process of unfolding: a terrible half-glimpsed fate that the characters are powerless to resist

The Porpoise begins as a page-turning thriller and soon shifts into something slippery and strange – but remains propulsive throughout

Mark Haddon’s best novel yet. The Porpoise begins as a propulsive thriller…and segues into a classical-world adventure that reinvents the story of Pericles in prose of a hallucinatory vividness

The Porpoise reworks legend with the compelling force of a thriller

[An] exquisite retelling of Shakespeare’s Pericles

Thrilling, dramatic and exquisitely written, The Porpoise combines myth and reality to enthralling effect