"A tour-de-force . . . Soldier Sailor is an astonishing high-wire act: a narrative at once raw and polished, brutally funny and quietly devastating, every sentence a precision-guided missile . . . That she can render new what has been so often documented is testament to the originality of her prose, which she makes appear effortless." --The Observer

"Visceral, beautifully written . . . It is, among other things, a lament for lost youth, and it is told with raw, painful and hard-earned panache." --The Sunday Independent

"A whole-body experience . . . it comes at you full-throttle, as if delivered on a single breath. . . . [Read] alongside the likes of Helen Simpson, Rachel Cusk and Sarah Moss." --The Guardian

"In this searing examination of the toll motherhood can take on a woman, Claire Kilroy joins the illustrious company of authors like Anne Enright and Elizabeth Strout." --Irish Independent

"A powerful, affecting and exquisitely written exploration of the nerve-shredding enormity of early motherhood." --Irish Examiner

"Claire Kilroy made me cry. The ending to her novel is beautiful, tender, noble even. A happy ending that makes you cry--surely that's the best of both worlds. Kilroy makes a well-trodden subject feel original by combining literary skill with warmth, humor and wicked observations of everyday life. On nearly every page there was a sentence or an observation that I wanted to underline because it was funny, lovely or real." --The Times (UK)

"Kilroy has a sharp precision; not just in terms of emotion, but sentence-wise. . . . How, the book proposes, do we disinfect the more toxic kinds of masculinity? How do we recognize the work, sacrifice and grief of women? These are large questions for a relatively slim book, but my, it raises them." --The Scotsman

"Brilliant, brutally honest, very funny . . . A novel that immediately feels like the definitive work on modern motherhood, one that breaks every taboo." --The Sunday Times (UK)

"Virtuosic . . . a resonant and important book, vital in all senses of the word, a flare sent up from the shores of early motherhood, a lesson in surviving the wilderness." --Irish Times

"A fully realized depiction of love, hate, despair and hope, conveyed in prose of mesmerizing vitality, richly layered with myth and fairy tale, the tragic and the comedic. Passionately rendered, searingly honest, Kilroy succeeds in articulating both the profound and commonplace reality of this mother of all rites of passage." --Financial Times

"A radiant and fearless work of universal import." --Sebastian Barry

"A scorching read, I could not put it down." --Anne Enright

"The most uncompromising, provocative novel I've read in quite some time. Every word reflects the pain, joy, struggles and surprising isolation of motherhood." --John Boyne