What You Want

Unlike any other book published this year, indeed this century … Dante, adultery, theme parks, psychotherapy - it’s all here, but unjokily so, and one of the most moving things about the book is the unusual texture of its melancholy seriousness - Guardian

Moving, scary, funny, endlessly interesting and much the best book I have read this year. We have a Pushkin in our midst, with his gift of saying incredibly sad - and deep - things in bubbly and often ingenious verse - Spectator

The most daring novel to have appeared in English for decades … A Dantesque journey into marriage, theme parks and Freudian theory, it is written in rhyming couplets and needs to be read in sections, preferably aloud, late at night, and in the round - Times Literary Supplement

Forges something new. This is rather an extraordinary, even sublime, achievement … His work has a purity of purpose whose form both delights and teaches - Spectator

Subtly reminds one of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ and of T. S. Eliot … Masterly and moving - Telegraph

[Has] a sense of deep wisdom … Truly moving and beautiful - Spectator

I loved What You Want … Phipps is a hero … beautiful, peculiar, and in the end very moving - Spectator

Mesmerising … Intelligent, enjoyable and often profound - Spectator