The Bricks That Built The Houses: The Sunday Times Bestseller - Tapa blanda

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)

It gets into your bones. You don't even realise it, until you're driving through it, watching all the things you've always known and leaving them behind.

Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving town in a fourth-hand Ford Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are running from jealous boyfriends, dead-end jobs, violent maniacs and disgruntled drug dealers, in the hope of escaping the restless tedium of life in south-east London - the place they have always called home.

As the story moves back in time, to before they had to leave, we see them torn between confidence and self-loathing, between loneliness and desire, between desperate ambition and the terrifying prospect of getting nothing done.

In The Bricks that Built The Houses Kate Tempest explores contemporary city life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us irresistible stories of hidden lives, and showing us how the best intentions don't always lead to the right decisions