The Bricks that Built the Houses: The Sunday Times Bestseller - Hardcover

Wonderful (Lauren Laverne)

Soaring . Tempest's flair for language is tempered by her sense of rhythm and pace . Deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity . Tempest's voice - by turns raging and tender - never falters (New York Times)

This is a bold, bright, beguiling novel; a lustrous pageant that dazzles and grips . An irresistible, immersive snapshot of a changing world, delivered in woozy, staccato sentences . There's great pleasure to be taken from Tempest's debut . She may well be unstoppable (Sunday Telegraph)

One of the leading wordsmiths of our time . She turns her raw, observational skills in book form to the urban young growing up poor - sex, drugs and increasing poverty amid the looming threat of gentrification (Jon Snow)

It's hard not to be blown away by Kate Tempest . A stirring, post-Dickensian lens trained on London's lonely underbelly (Evening Standard)

This book is almost everything I hoped it would be. That is praise indeed, as I had high hopes ... As lyrical as it is gritty, and as devoted to (south-east) London as it is to humanity, with all its foibles (New Statesman)

Tempest has a knack for the devastating throwaway line - a skill-honed, no doubt, from years of rapping and spoken-word performances. Her work is rich with underlinable lines . Captivating (New Yorker)

Everything Kate tempest does comes from the same gnawing desire to tell stories and change the world ... The book covers come-ups, comedowns, gender identity, parents torn apart by activism and the brutal, beautiful face of survival against the odds ... Blistering **** (NME)

Explosive . Fresh and vivid visions of a familiar world . It recalls two other great, recent, experimental novels about being young: Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. There's the same sense of daring and linguistic inventiveness, the same feeling of language pushed to its limits . It fairly flies off the page (Observer)

A story of accidental adventure and loss in what feels like London's boiling crucible of race, class and sexuality . This novel requires giving oneself over to its linguistic world . It seems not just to describe a contemporary world but chart the migratory and class movements that has led it to its current state (Andrew McMillan, Independent)