Guy Gunaratne throws words against the wall and makes us watch them bounce. You feel the heat, reel from the sound, and bump to the unstoppable pulse. A novel so of this moment that you don’t even realize you’ve waited your whole life for it.

Gunaratne has a gift for inhabiting the lives of his characters, and has used that gift here to give life to Londoners who are not often seen in contemporary fiction… a very fine novel

Utterly alive. Joyous in its language

A beautiful, fierce storm of a book, full of courage and hope

What a voice. What an ear for language. No mean feat to capture the street, the nuance of black experience, the architecture of so many different lives. It’s a brave and original piece of work

A riotous hymn to urban life… passionate, compelling

This is cracking. Original, honest voices and a vivid portrayal of a London rarely seen in literature

A vivid and affecting account of estate life, both blighted by frustration and elevated by dreams we can all recognise and share. Guy’s characters are drawn with compassion and flair, and I was captivated by their humanity

A timely read, addressing the urgent questions of our divided society. We’re sure Guy is set for big things

Gritty, grotesque; graceful and beautiful. This is the London that we call home

This novel is a love letter to the language of London’s streets and to its people, but also a blistering look at a city on the edge that’ll sweep you up until you reach the book’s breathless, devastating conclusion

A blistering debut unlike anything I’ve read before. This is a powerful, raw, yet heartrending account of 48 hours on a London estate

The prose remains alive, alert and subtly integrated, with various accents and non-standard Englishes raising themselves up to the same very high literary watermark. This is one of the hardest things to pull off for a prose stylist. The Dominican-born American writer Junot Diaz is, possibly, the finest living exponent of it. Gunaratne is no doubt on his way. What you are left with – always a treat though not by any stretch as essential to all writing as some would have you believe – is a prose that benefits from being read aloud. But more so, a prose that just plain deserves to be read

In Our Mad and Furious City is fraught and heartbreaking at the same time, with a biting, in-your-face clarity to it that you can’t ignore. It’s a searing marvel of a novel

In Our Mad and Furious City is our favourite debut of 2018. Gunaratne draws on growing up in north-west London in this tale of 48 hours on a council estate, where three young boys dream of escaping

This riotous hymn to urban life takes a passionate, compelling look at youth culture

Two days of race riots, three teenage boys on a north London estate and a grittily realistic patois throughout make this debut glitter despite the darkness

Already hailed as a modern masterpiece, this timely and authentic portrayal of life for young men living on our city estates is as mesmerising as it is vital