Mark Lawson in the News Statesman: “In an era when publishers and reading groups exert so much pressure towards the soft read, Self … is saving the life of the hard read that rewards the attention demanded.” Review here.

Sam Leith in the Observer: “Self shares JG Ballard’s interest in the psychopathology of everyday life, and in the insistent strange juxtapositions between apparently discrete things. But where Ballard most often works at the level of symbol and image, and is almost militantly uninterested in the inner lives of his characters, Self’s rhymes and correlations bubble in the language itself, and his whole method is concerned with inwardness.” Review here.