Press Reviews

• Keiran Goddard

  Ava Anna Ada is both brilliantly stylish and horribly unnerving . . . an almost impossibly elegant evocation of violence, eroticism and derangement. A weird, furious, fucked-up fable.

• Rob Doyle

  'Tense, ruthless and fevered, Ava Anna Ada is a bracingly original tale of lust and malice amidst dementing heat, general unravelling, and the late nightmares of a screaming planet.'

• Ewan Morrison

  Love and lust are the dark forces that intertwine within Ava Anna Ada. Millar is a rare talent and has created a hypnotic, profound and mesmerising novel

• Miki Berenyi

  'Shocking and uncompromising, but effortlessly and unpretentiously so, Millar's writing is visceral and vibrant; piercingly astute in rendering the inner thoughts and raw emotions of her protagonists, unearthing diamonds of humanity from the mire of brutality'

• Wendy Erskine

  'A work of exquisite strangeness, Ava Anna Ada is unsettling and arresting. It moves from character to character, page to page, with beguiling relentlessness. Ali Millar's writing is full of dark richness and fevered heat, but also cool stringency in its exploration of grief and femininity.'

• Ian Rankin

  Kay Dick's They meets early Iain Banks or Ian McEwan in this novel of a near-future family meltdown. Every bit as gripping as it is horrifying.

• Ian Rankin

  Kay Dick's They meets early Iain Banks or Ian McEwan in this novel of a near-future family meltdown. Every bit as gripping as it is horrifying.

• Rob Doyle

  Tense, ruthless and fevered, Ava Anna Ada is a bracingly original tale of lust and malice amidst dementing heat, general unravelling, and the late nightmares of a screaming planet.

• Ewan Morrison

  Love and lust are the dark forces that intertwine within Ava Anna Ada. Millar is a rare talent and has created a hypnotic, profound and mesmerising novel

• Miki Berenyi

  Shocking and uncompromising, but effortlessly and unpretentiously so, Millar's writing is visceral and vibrant; piercingly astute in rendering the inner thoughts and raw emotions of her protagonists, unearthing diamonds of humanity from the mire of brutality

• Wendy Erskine

  A work of exquisite strangeness, Ava Anna Ada is unsettling and arresting. It moves from character to character, page to page, with beguiling relentlessness. Ali Millar's writing is full of dark richness and fevered heat, but also cool stringency in its exploration of grief and femininity.

• Lucy Caldwell

  So striking... like seeing our last few years through a distorted fever-dream. The precision and delicacy of the violence is uncanny

• Stuart Kelly

  The Scotsman

  Ava Anna Ada is as brilliantly queasy as Nabokov's final novel, Look At The Harlequins! ... This is an unforgettable and unflinching book. Even though there are moments of ghastly comedy it manages to end with a moment of sublimity. But the sublime, as Blake described it, something overwhelming that reminds us of our mortality, of the 'terrible uncertainty of the thing'

• Financial Times

  A perverse, dark tale of shifting identities, deceit and manipulation

• Guardian

  A bleeding, sweating story

• The Herald

  A unique and fiercely original debut novel