From the reviews of Ring Road:
‘It reminded me most of Jerome K. Jerome & Mellow, intelligent and very funny, a perfect antidote for melancholy’
Michael Moorcock, Guardian
‘Calls to mind two other outstanding novels; Tristram Shandy & and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 & One of those rare books that, once picked up, proves very difficult to put down’
Irish Independent
‘In all his rambling, digressive warmth, Sansom insists throughout that, contrary to fashionable opinion, human life is as eccentric and various in the small and overlooked corners as it is in the big city’
Daily Telegraph
‘Wonderfully comic’
Daily Mail
‘Quirky, perky & Here is no ordinary talent’
Spectator
‘Daring & Funny & Fearless’
Times Literary Supplement
‘A dissection of small-town life & recognisable to any reader who has ever lived in one, in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland’
Independent
‘Wonderfully vivid, easy, natural, funny, and moving’
Oliver Sacks
‘Delightful. I have read it with much pleasure’
Joyce Carol Oates
‘What a delight! I had no intention of stopping everything to read it – but then I did … I have never been to Northern Ireland but now I feel at home there’
Charles Simic
‘Cross Jonathan Franzen with Henry Fielding, and what you have is a twenty-first-century lament for times past dressed in eighteenth-century clothing, complete with chapter summaries, footnotes, and an index. Read this book with someone close at hand because you’ll want to keep quoting the funny bits’
Library Journal
‘Rich and inventive and inclines you toward generosity … A humane, big-hearted and sometimes devastatingly funny book, not to be underestimated’
Geoff Nicholson, LA Weekly
‘A work of tender and bonhomous refraction’
Claire Messud, Newsday
‘Fluent, flawless, richly observed & reminiscent of Roddy Doyle at his very best’
Jockey Slut
‘A poetic elegy for a community’
Irish Times
‘Sharply drawn & gloriously funny’
(BMI Voyager magazine)
‘Fabulous … It made me cry on the Belfast to Bangor train’
County Down Spectator