Wonderful...I was hooked from the first page. Barney has the real novelist's ability to inhabit different characters, and to make the texture of life tangible and compelling. Everything he writes about love, loss, grief, desolation, and moments of hope and illumination rings absolutely true. It's the real stuff.
Michael Frayn Remember the name Barney Norris. He's ... Read morea new writer in his mid-twenties, but already outstanding.
Times
Looks well beyond the literary intelligentsia's world, describing with great humanity five ordinary lives, and coming close, as it does so, to being a state of the nation novel - albeit one with none of the bombast the term usually implies...deeply affecting...a tolerant and insightful debut
Guardian
Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent...a writer-chronicler to be cherished.
Evening Standard
Outstanding...a moving, strangely uplifting novel that grapples with the coarse substance of everyday existence and poetically celebrates its passage. Superb.
Mail on Sunday
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