A stunning novel. Remarkable and real. Every single line is supercharged with a kind of cerebral eroticism, a zinging inventive intelligence. The sentences buzz and hum

Sharp and entertaining

Impressive… A book founded on the anxiety that undermines our drive towards attachment and stability, and it thrives on a constant sense of slippage and precarity, a jumpy exploration of what it might feel like to cede control, and what might take its place

Pountney has an admirable clarity of voice and her book is consistently impressive… Intelligent, confident and original

How to Be Somebody Else has literary oomph… What sets this debut apart is the way it sustains its sparky style to the last page without stinting on the serious stuff

Brutal and brilliant, in luscious prose, How to Be Somebody Else shows us what happens when life starts to unfurl

Unsettling and original

So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard

Compulsive. It makes its moves with such assurance that it’s hard to believe this is Pountney’s first novel. A wild mess of sex and feeling is here given beautiful form

A novel of graceful sentences and perfectly-lit vignettes, often obliquely funny; the minutiae and questionable decisions of a newly reimagined life, observed at just the right distance for us to see the whole and the details at once