Heliopolis

Heliopolis is written in beautiful, clear prose, at ease equally with the flittering, dangerous games of the socialites and with the pungent depths of the slums...James Scudamore has produced a fascinating study of a young man's awakening and a city of peril

Literary Review

A book that will linger in your consciousness long after you put it down

Pink Guide

A poignant and absorbing novel

BookMunch

A triumph

New Statesman

A witty, vivid and disquieting story

John Preston, Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

Fast-paced with ingenious and constant twists, brilliantly sharp... an unsettling and magically compelling read

Daily Mail

James Scudamore again achieves something magical

Ben East, The Guardian

Ludo is a fascinatingly flawed narrator, and the language is alive with livid, unsettling imagery

Sunday Telegraph

Merits the epithet Dickensian in a number of ways: In its generous anger at injustice and inequality, its attention to the lives of the poor, and its relish for food... But, as with Dickens, you don't read this for the plot, but for the power of the writing, the descriptions that fizz off the page, and the lust for life

Independent on Sunday

Scudamore has the superb novelist's gift for giving vivid, sympathetic life to even second string characters, as well as his main ones; he also has the extraordinary power of summoning an entire brooding, smoggy city to life. Most of all, he has the ability to take on the heaviest of themes with the lightest and most compelling of touches, and leave you with an appetite for more

Daily Telegraph

Scudamore is an accomplished stylist...he skewers the excesses and banality of advertising with panache...a triumph, in particular in its depiction of third word urban sprawl

Economist

Slinkily assured... a steamlined fantasy summons up a teeming citadel where the wealthy take to their helicopters "like fat flies", leaving migrant workers to swarm below

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

The writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work

Guardian

The writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work, one whose command of tone is strong, and who has an instinctive feel for handling a story

Guardian

There is so much... brilliantly at work in James Scudamore's Heliopolis that it seems arbitrary to praise one element over another

Megan L McCarthy, The Irish Times