“It is a Waterland for the Outer Hebrides...it’s a major landmark in fiction of the islands...it’s a landmark in Scottish literature and contemporary fiction more broadly...makes cunning shifts into para-memoir, pseudo-biography, hints of the documentary, but it’s always mobile, always moving. Line for line, the voice was so lively, so inventive, that I relished each paragraph ... Story within story, concentrically nested, or maybe hung like hooks on a line to catch the readers... It’s a bright and vivid and true book, and a work of literature, unmistakably.”
Robert Macfarlane. “It’s absorbing and riveting. There’s not a single paragraph in A Book of Death and Fish when we are not engaged by the vigour and jump and insistence of his voice.” "Stephen brings a contained concentration and intensity to his chapters that is mesmerizing and true in a deeper way." "Dense, compelling and wildly idiosyncratic, it’s a novel that splits the form open like a fresh catch, glistening and raw and singing with the sea.”
Kirsty Gunn "A Book Of Death And Fish may well take its place beside Moby-Dick...It will, I suspect, be one of those books I will not put down all my days."
Candia McWilliam "A fine, far-reaching and and sensitive book." "An excellent, enjoyable and engaging read.” "Ian Stephen has excavated the life and the places that he knows to write a big, sprawling kaleidoscopic and often brilliant book. It is an heir to Neil Gunn as well as to Kevin MacNeil’s 'The Stornoway Way'.
Roger Hutchinson
West Highland Free Press