‘Very much fun.’

‘Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust, wonderfully strange but still familiar and real. Get in Trouble is filled with pocket universes, each tale containing so much more than its length might suggest and crackling with the unexpect: the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.’

‘In this utterly astonishing new collection, Kelly Link demonstrates a perfect and completely mature command of the entirely unexpected, ever-evolving, self-examining, deeply original and personal, emotion-riddled kind of story only Kelly Link is capable of writing.’

‘Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts.’

‘The tales are imaginatively bizarre yet can be seen as allegorical representations of our own crazy modern world. Most of the protagonists here are female and resourceful; it’s a pleasure to immerse oneself in fantasy worlds where women aren’t victims or pale stereotypes.’

‘Nobody writes stories like Kelly Link…Seek out this book and then dig through her others: she’s a modern master of the short story, skewering our lives at every step.’

‘There are surprises on every page. Nothing is what it seems; everything is much more. In short, Kelly Link is magic.’

‘It resonates with depth and maturity, the sense of a writer using genre for her purposes rather than the other way around…With Get In Trouble, she has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.’

‘The nine stories in Link’s fourth collection sizzle with surprises…Link is one of a kind.’

‘Does any writer have a better, deeper instinct for the subterranean overlap between pop culture and myth…Link remains a master of a delicate genre.’

‘Kelly Link has finally finished what she started more than a decade ago – she has obliterated genre. These stories take a wrecking ball to labels like “literary realism,” “science fiction,” “fairytales,” and “magical realism,” and then build something beautiful, complex and intricately imaginative from the rubble…My advice: Go read this book. Do it now.’

‘Link’s stories are never fully realist, but they are always beautifully written…Like other writers in the tradition of the modern American short story, she wants us to look closely at the small stuff of life.’

‘As a writer Kelly Link is possessed of many magical powers, but to me what’s most notable about her new collection, Get in Trouble, is its astonishing freedom…her imaginative freedom is unmitigated by a need to counterbalance the weirdness with explanation.’

‘Kelly Link in a nutshell: inordinately brainy, always concise, darkly whimsical, and entertaining as heck.’

‘Link’s writing is characterised by both a high literary value and a deep human sentiment. Images and language sparkle, imagination and craft combining to create the most vivid of reading experiences.’

‘Link is always in exquisite control–a committed emotional realist with a bottomless bag of surprises.’

‘I’d rather read Kelly Link than breathe…This book is everything I wished for.’

‘Link should be required reading for every writer, even writers whose styles deviate completely from hers: it is necessary to understand the sheer possibilities of form, of genre. To understand how rules can be twisted, snapped, shattered.’

‘When it comes to literary magic, Link is the real deal: clever, surprising, affecting, fluid and funny.’

‘Link’s prose and ideas dazzle; so much so that you don’t see the swift elbow to the emotional solar plexus coming until it’s far, far too late.’

‘Ms. Link never fusses over the surreal twists in her stories, but they contain so much emotional truth that there’s no need to explain a thing.’

‘With every tale [Link] conjures a different universe, each more captivating than the last…you’ll long to return the minute you leave.’

‘Get in Trouble is one of the strongest collections I’ve read recently; each story is finely calibrated, with Link’s surreal but utterly believable logic, suspense and heart.’

‘All I want is for everyone to devour [Link’s] books.’

‘It’s a challenge to describe Kelly Link’s dazzling short stories. On the one hand they are deliciously, deliriously strange…Yet they are also sad, sexy, tender, keenly aware not just of the human yearning at their centres, but of the absurdities those desires lead us into.’

‘Get in Trouble is a dazzling testimony to the malleability of [Link’s] medium and her mastery of it.’

‘Link effectively mixes the dark fantastic with Borgesian quirkiness.’

‘Link fuses the miraculous and the ordinary so gorgeously and delicately, you’ll never find the seam between them.’

‘It’s little wonder that the short story seems to be having its moment in the sun; here it shows its ability to compress lifetimes seething with tension and crystallise moments blazing with desire and defiance, into handfuls of taut, finely wrought pages.’

‘Utterly original and surprising…Yep, Kelly Link is a one off.’