The Daily Mail has a short positive review of This is How. You can read it online here Extract: The description of life on the inside is as remarkable for its authenticity as it is for the development of Patrick’s character. Alongside the relentless hopelessness, the struggle for existence itself and the constant undertow of [...]

Leading Australian book critic Geordie Williamson has reviewed This is How in the newspaper The Australian. The full review is here. Here’s an extract: Hyland’s writing, which has only increased in strangeness with each new book, emerges from a shifting of co-ordinates between cold-eyed clinician and artist’s empathetic heart. Her characters are constructed from the [...]

John O’Connell reviews This is How in The New Statesman The full review is online here. Here’s an extract: In his desire to force a face-off between the Two Cultures, McEwan often seems to be writing himself out of a job. M J Hyland, in her subtle and richly exploratory new novel, adopts the opposite [...]

The Telegraph has reviewed This is How. The full review is available online here. An extract: MJ Hyland is an expert anatomist of the bruises left on a fragile mind by a hard world. [...] Hyland mentions Albert Camus as one of her literary inspirations, and Oxtoby shares with Camus’s Meursault – and with a [...]

Anita Sethi reviews This is How in the Independent The full review can be read here. Here’s an extract: As in her earlier books, Hyland beautifully and devastatingly depicts her sympathetic anti-hero’s painful craving for closeness. [...] Hyland, a former lawyer, has a shrewd and convincing eye for the minutiae of the justice (and injustice) [...]

Julie Myerson, author of The Lost Child, reviews This is How for the Financial Times. The full review is here. Here’s an excerpt: The descriptions of prison life are impeccable and chilling in their detail, entirely convincing in their evocation of how men rub along together when deprived of freedom, family and hope. Oxtoby’s relationships [...]

Helen Dunmore reviews This is How for The Times. The full review is here> An extract: the novel offers a moment-by-moment account of the transformation that takes place when a person commits an irrevocable act and enters the criminal justice system. Hyland’s focus is steady, her detail relentless. [...] This is an expertly paced, gripping [...]

Justine Jordan reviews This is how in the Guardian. The full review can be found here. Here are some excerpts: “This is it. I need to shit and I need to cry and I can do neither.” How the subject of MJ Hyland’s outstanding third novel comes to be thrust into a shared prison cell, [...]