“These isolated, precarious refuges, at once exposed and welcoming, allow Richards to interrogate ideas of home and escape, of safety and adventure, all in a narrative whose principal pleasure is the time the reader gets to spend in the author’s amiable, erudite, Tiggerish company … Richards is often compared to his friend Rober Macfarlane, but his voice is much closer to that of Geoff Dyer: vivid, self-deprecating, literary and very, very funny.”

“Sitting static, miles from the sea, reading Runcie’s account of childbirth during one of my son’s post-lunch naps had me in tears. It was as visceral and as heroic as any Homeric epic. I may not know Runcie, not live on a coast, have nothing fishy in my background, but hearing her story of pain and broken waters made me feel true affinity. I felt, as she describes in relation to the lives of fishermen’s wives, like a woman standing on the shore, looking at the drama unfolding far out at sea. I felt like someone with salt on my face and air in my lungs; a piece of something greater and more magnificent, enacted by women everywhere.”

“Because this, after all, is what fiction is supposed to do. For the few hours or days or weeks that we are held by a book, it should lead us towards other places and other lives. It should un-centre us, and reorient our imaginations.” A brilliant essay by Malachy Tallack (author of The Valley at the Centre of the World) on how fiction can force us to reconsider ‘remoteness’.

“This is a very fine novel indeed … Anybody who seeks to understand the world as it is today will find enlightenment here.”

“I definitely don’t judge people who become passionately involved in a political struggle, even to the point of taking up weapons in the service of that struggle, in the way that I would have before beginning the book.”

John Wray interviewed in the Guardian about his novel, Godsend, and the intriguing – and maybe risky – political ground it treads.

An extract from Tracey Thorn’s Another Planet in the Observer.

‘This is laugh-out-loud, delightful comedic writing. It captures a mood of escapism and nostalgia that I found incredibly reassuring and cheering. More Keggie, please.’

“A significant literary performance … Godsend builds to a shattering, balefully vivid ending.”