The Stars in the Bright Sky

The way that this middle-aged man manages to inhabit a gang of girls with such gusto and conviction is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction, and Warner has done it once again

Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

Vigorous and uncannily convincing... Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

Daily Telegraph

You don't have to have read The Sopranos to make sense of The Stars in the Bright Sky, or to be instantly hooked by it

Observer

Memorably bittersweet... [with] brilliantly pitched dialogue and monologue. The final cataclysmic scene is masterly

Guardian

This is a snarly group picaresque, a black comedy in which Gatwick airport is like Kafka's Castle in reverse... stifling, hilarious and indelible

Nora Chassler, Scottish Review of Books

Highly-crafted, often beautiful writing

Irish Times

Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph

The author of The Sopranos catches up with the same cast of party-going wild girls, all beautifully imagined in pitch-perfect social satire

The Sunday Times Summer Reading

This entertaining comedy of manners

Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

Warner puts these very flesh-and-blood girls into locations of almost J G Ballardish sterility, with sodium lamps, flyovers and neon-signed hotels, all described beautifully. The way he manages to inhabit his gang of girls with such gusto is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction

Phil Baker, Sunday Times

Pitch-perfect dialogue elevates this exhilarating, genuinely inspired novel into something that is, in Manda's phrase, 'dead brilliant'

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Embedded in an unflinching portrayal or working-class femininity - all binge-drinking, chain-smoking, shrieking vulgarity and copious vomiting - is a brilliant anatomy of shifting group dynamics, many nods to Beckett's waiting games, and a sly engagement with Ballard's reading of airport space as the ultimate home of deracinated modernity

Chris Ross, Guardian

Warner is fascinated by the strange domesticity of 'non-places', and occasionally cranks up the alienation to describe their fixtures - literally, the light fixtures, room numbers and air-conditioning units - with a nouveau roman blankness... The most striking passages of the novel are in this clunky yet exoticising register, which inverts the technique of The Sopranos by making the warmth and fluency of the gang seem contained by the proprieties of adulthood. It brings with it a control-tower angle of vision that subtly distorts familiar language...

London Review of Books

Warner navigates the comic, the philosophical and the socially acute like no other writer we have

Independent

Warner's comic depictions of the multiple tensions that run through the group finds its masterstroke in the grotesquely deluded yet impossible to dislike Manda, who is a neat satirical cipher for modern celebrity-obsessed culture. Terrific

Metro

Beautifully imagined in a pitch-perfect social satire

Sunday Times, Summer Reading