What Becomes

A first-rate collection

Sunday Telegraph

A L Kennedy's short stories are rare pearls, all seductive surface and dark depths

Vogue

A virtuoso of prose

London Review of Books

A virtuoso performance...This is a collection of stories that will be re-reading exceptionally well, like an album of brilliant songs you keep wanting to hear again

Brandom Robshaw, Independent on Sunday

A.L.Kennedy really dazzles, yet again, in her exceptional new collection

Independent on Sunday

AL Kennedy manages to convey an edgy modernity within relatively standard narrative forms...written with the tonal meticulousness of genuine literature

Lionel Shriver, Financial Times

Be warned, Kennedy is a good storyteller, and an even better observer, possessing immaculate timing... She also writes very well: there is an almost jaunty ease about her prose

Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

Funny and furious, Kennedy's tales of floundering marriages and domestic disappointment follow an anarchic path of their own

Independent

If you are at all interested in contemporary fiction, this is work you must not miss

Richard Ford

It's a testament to her talent and her humanity that these broken lives are life-affirming in the way that only good art can be

Laura Tennant, New Statesman

Kennedy has a way of pinning words down and forcing the truth out of them that makes her fiction alarming. There is pleasure in reading these extraordinary stories, but there is also pain

Alison Kelly, Times Literary Supplement

Kennedy has such control over her material that it never overwhelms the reader or becomes showily gothic

Matt Thorne, Sunday Telegraph

Kennedy is attuned to the shock of separation, as well as the pain ... Kennedy is adept at different types of stories

Leo Robson, Express

Kennedy specialises in acute observations of thought... In this collection of short stories, she inhabits unhappy couples, lonely shopkeepers and strangers in hotel rooms to searing, painful and comic effect

Holly Kyte, Daily Telegraph

Kennedy's new stories continue the courageous anatomy of emotional pain that has always been at the centre of her writing. Sometimes stomach churning, bleak and humorous in turn, she is rightly viewed as one of the most brilliant and eccentric writers of her generation

Ruth Scurr, The Times

Kennedy's superlative work always attracts admiration

Lesley McDowell, Herald

Savour this book

Erica Wagner, The Times, Christmas Books

The hardest thing about the advent of a new collection of stories by A L Kennedy... is the search for synonyms for 'brilliant'. Her uncanny dialogue is as note-perfect as J D Salinger's her vision as astutely bleak as Alice Munro's, and her ability to summon up a society in a few strokes rivals William Trevor's

Spectator

There is poetic life in so many of Kennedy's images... She can be very funny too... very original, very startling

Miranda France, Literary Review

There's no denying that these utterly controlled stories have a power, humanity, and even beauty of their own

Amber Pearson, Daily Mail

These tightly compressed short stories are deft portraits of people under extreme pressure, delivered with a surreal perspective that oddly serves to compound their power...her writing is superb: almost every word in this flinty, almost unbearably sad collection matters

Metro

Twelve stories from the manic mistress of comically vitriolic observation

Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

Very funny and very angry

Guardian

What admirable richness and complexity

Jane Shilling, Evening Standard

While What Becomes is not always an easy book to read, Kennedy's linguistic inventiveness, wild humour and compassion make it an unexpectedly joyful one

The London Review of Books

Wonderfully offbeat

Scotsman