"there’s an enviable clarity and forthrightness to Slimani’s writing..."

"extraordinarily taut and compelling..."

"a thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas..."

"a subtle, delicate evocation of modern life..."

" Dear Friend demonstrates how, in fiction, there is the potential to find freedom and escape from life..."

"This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain..."

"revels in its own complexity, blending humour and tragedy..."

"cleverly blends nimble, sometimes slapstic humour with an affecting commentary on the corrosive legacy of violence..."

"smart genre-bending ideas..."

"...this sense of the fugitive, the restless characters and their obsessions, that both buoys the narrative and ultimately lets it down..."

"brings to life vivid worlds of terror and unease..."

"Once again James Lee Burke has created a phantasmagoric fable..."

"a great success: richly observed, lovingly drawn and determinedly clear-eyed to the last..."

"It’s savagely political, disturbing and fiercely optimistic, the deeply felt work of a writer who refuses to stop asking the hardest questions..."

"Roupenian herself, with her transgressive collection, gets the last laugh on an audience that dissected her and underestimated her..."

"French offers a masterclass in unreliability..."

"quietly revelatory..."

"(a) remarkable debut novel..."

"This is a remarkable, radical, historical novel..."

"brief, dark and wonderfully atmospheric..."

"a meanderingly precise, lugubriously comic and at times transcendent rendering of the workings of thought..."