Pig Iron is an important book because it tells a story that has shaped all contemporary Western humans, but is routinely, inexplicably overlooked – the great move from agricultural life to industrial life. The respect in which that shapes human culture and individual humans

Judge Deborah Orr

His poetic vernacular brims with that quality most sadly lost – humanity

Guardian

One of my best reads this year ... A deeply rural story, a book full of passion for the English countryside and centred on the conflict between the travelling and the settled community. A very fine read indeed, it expresses a life view almost never examined in our narrow literary culture

Melvin Burgess

A novel that resists mere classification as a 'traveller' book. This is yet another singular portrait of an outsider from Myers. And delivered through authentic characterisation, a monstrously compelling plot, and frequent humour – a rare combination of such successfully crafted elements – Pig Iron deserves to find itself on many a reading list, if not the National Curriculum

3:AM Magazine

What a staggeringly powerful book. It held me page by page, totally took me over. If I had to opt for a single word to encompass the experience of reading the book, I'd settle for 'ferocious'

Dominic Cooper, author of The Dead Of Winter and Sunrise.

Original and urgent, exciting and uncompromising

Loud & Quiet, Books of the Year