Uncompromising yet exhilaratingly charged by Mottley's deep feeling and stylistic flair

Daily Mail, Books of the Year

Nineteen-year-old poet Leila Mottley has been hailed as the 'voice of a generation', a claim that seems less hyperbolic the more you read of her assured, moving and powerful fiction debut . . . Freighted with sentences of tough lyricism, it feels like an immense achievement

Daily Mail

A rare and compelling meditation on the powerless . . . Not only a fearless investigation of justice, guilt and prejudice, but an allegory of the potential power of speech, narrative and fiction itself . . . Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won't easily get out of your head

Guardian

She whips through the plot, packing poetic punch after punch . . . Now that Mottley has found her own voice, America – and readers in the UK – will be watching

i paper

Both a searing depiction of sexual exploitation and a gripping account of a struggle for survival… Grimly captivating … Rich and inventive

Economist

An uncommonly assured debut . . . Nightcrawling is written with a poet's ear and a novelist's sense of character, structure and ambience

Observer