Press Reviews

• Nikesh Shukla

  This devastating new novel from Guy Gunaratne confirms them as a writer at the top of their game. They balance an experimental structure with an indelible voice, exploring global, social politics and resolve with ease. Their use of language, precision, thoughtfulness and humanity, make this is the book you will all be reading in 2023

• Raymond Antrobus

  Gunaratne offers us the study of a young man navigating many identities while searching for security and selfhood. Mister, Mister is a modern testimony of the "British / other" subject as well as an invitation for us, readers, lovers of stories to be defined on our own terms. This is a vital novel of newness and nowness that testifies to the power of fiction that seeks truth --

• Anna James

  Such a sharp and clever book that absolutely refuses easy interpretation. It's about language and faith and extremism and ideas of home and identity and freedom. But also about the opposite of all that - an undoing of identity. One of those really refreshing books that truly doesn't feel like anything I've read before, and one I'm still thinking about

• Big Issue

  It's the effervescence and emotional depth of their writing that make Mister, Mister a knockout

• Musa Okwonga

  This book tears through you. A searing, shocking odyssey through faith, fury, and the boiling despair at the heart of our age

• Leone Ross

  I wish I could declare a national reading day in Britain where adults read the same book together, beginning with Mister, Mister. Gunaratne fits a whole nation inside one complex character and in doing so shows us our bones and our souls. Brimming with compassion and Dickensian in its breadth, this incredibly important book eviscerates othering and insists that Britain claim a new identity

• Isabel Waidner

  Gunaratne is a writer with a rare ability to inhabit savants, outsiders, rebels and others who exist at the so-called margins of mainstream society, and who they write slapbang into the centre. Moving between women's houses and detention centres, global and UK politics, tenderness and devastation, Mister, Mister is where it's at

• Salena Godden

  Guy Gunaratne's writing comes with big energy and empathy. Illuminated with evocative language and vivid storytelling, Mister Mister salutes belonging in the unbelonging: an essential read for these times

• Kiran Millwood Hargrave

  A quicksilver astonishment of a book, deft and devastating and completely original. Just read it

• Observer

  A rollercoaster coming of age picaresque... glories in the infinite bounty of storytelling

• Esquire

  Incisive... an engrossing romp through recent UK history, underpinned by the question: what does it mean to be British?

• Guardian

  Thrillingly unstable, as verbally roiling as a pirate radio broadcast, animated by a charismatic antihero prone to "rampant wilding bents". At the same time, what makes it so important is how, like Preti Taneja's Aftermath or the poetry of Bhanu Kapil, it's also drawn to silence and hermeticism: to brown opacity

• Booklist

  Brilliantly evocative of the effects of recent horrors many people are all-too keen to forget, Gunaratne's latest affirms that they are a writer with a unique voice and a magnificent ear for dialogue

• New Statesman

  Vivid. Gunaratne is a skilful storyteller who imaginatively confronts the complexity of identity and unbelonging in Britain

• The Times

  A provocative powder-keg of a novel. The first-person narrator is so compelling