Hyland's exquisitely crafted prose makes readers care for this emotionally disjointed protagonist.
Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

From the first pages the laconic first-person narrative is full of tension ... Hyland's focus is steady, her detail relentless. The novel becomes deeply moving, not because there is any special pleading for Oxtoby but because it stays with a devastated man in all his weakness ... This is an expertly paced, gripping novel that doesn't falter and never compromises its emotional truth
Helen Dunmore, The Times

Patrick's discomfort is reflected in Hyland's terse, unadorned prose, choppy with one-sentence paragraphs that isolate each event from the next, just as Patrick is cut off from his own response to them.
Rachel Aspden, Observer

Effective and compelling.
Lesley McDowell, Sunday Herald

Darkly, sparsely, and with sustained intensity, Hyland constructs the montage of a killer ... a dash of Camus's Meursault is added to the pathology ... She writes intelligently about her subject's growing institutionalization, his bafflement growing into boredom then safety as Patrick gradually finds a kind of happiness inside ... From within these shady borderlands Hyland has produced a memorable study.
Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement

A vividly imagined novel ... Every word of Hyland's narrative - observed with the bright, deranged precision of a Richard Dadd painting - resonates with Patrick's tragic awareness of what he lacks.
Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph

Hyland's first two novels displayed a talent to delve into darkness. Her riveting follow-up, This Is How, its title as cryptic as the murderer Patrick Oxtoby who possesses its haunted pages, is her finest novel yet.
Tom Adair, Scotsman

Hyland creates a suffocating bubble of inevitability through the meticulous psychological make-up of Patrick ... The writing feels devoid of both action and emotion, and is painstakingly pedestrian in its present-tense observations, but as with Kafka and Camus, that in itself creates the effect of how grindingly bleak life can be ... It's a chilling study of society, the disaffected and the concept of justice.
Irish Independent

A tour de force. Hyland illuminates this man's damaged soul with such a steely, brilliant clarity that your heart breaks for him.
HELEN GARNER

M.J. Hyland has a ferocious imagination, and an eerie way of squeezing the distance between author, character and reader, so that the atmosphere of the book soaks and penetrates the reader's mind. When you've been reading Hyland, other writers seem to lack integrity; they seem wedded to weak confabulations, whereas she aims straight for the truth and the heart.
Hilary Mantel

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