Gunesekera's lush descriptions make you see and smell the island and feel its hot, damp air on your skin

Spectator

The film is waiting to be made. It's all there: an inverted but murky Pride and Prejudice, paradise spoilt, ill-fated lovers, rascals, imperial wickedness, the cunning of natives, plots and melees and a host of fabulous flowers. Romesh Gunesekera's novel takes the bouquet of romantic clichés and throws it up, makes it soar and scatter, leaving its scent in the air... Exquisite prose awakens all the senses ... a terrific read: pacey, political, moral, atmospheric and yes, definitely romantic

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Independent

Gunesekera is strikingly adept at delineating the landscape of rootlessness ... [He] has a gentle, generous, deceptively light touch

Sunday Times

Subtle and convincing, it is life as art, art as life. Gunesekera is gifted and possessed of a rare humility ... [his writing] shows what fiction can do, it shows why fiction is written - and read

Irish Times

Seriously and movingly, The Prisoner of Paradise contains a very modern message: a plea for the book. It has as much to say about writing as it has about love and colonial misery ... Here are the genuine answers, colourful, arresting, fresh and enormous as any opera

Todd McEwan, Glasgow Herald

In this blisteringly lucid novel, it's as if Jane Austen, John Keats, Charles Dickens and even William Burroughs have clubbed together to render a masterful double-take on the 19th century's own ideas of romance and empire, rendered in a colossally skilful, flexible hybrid of the best of English prose and prosody

Herald Scotland