Motel Nirvana: Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert

"McGrath is a cool-eyed chronicler of a dispossessed generation - philosophical, astute and ultimately unforgiving. This is no pseudo rock'n'roll road trip, but an accessible and insightful study of the modern condition. The final autobiographical chapter is breathtaking."

DEBORAH BOSLEY, 'Literary Review'

"McGrath meets the nation's lost souls of the New Age. A 267-year-old princess from the tribe of Atlantis, a technoshaman, an alien who talks to Barbie dolls, an overweight angel and a prince who will never die all impress her with their certainties as much as they depress her with their chronic self-awareness. It's an ambitious debut: McGrath has a keen sense for deadpan descriptions of off-kilter encounters, and an acute knack for deflating the Myth."

EMER BRIZZOLARA, 'Ikon'

"Fortifying herself with booze, cigarettes and a useful amount of asperity and common sense, McGrath painstakingly trawls the aisles of the spiritual supermarket. She writes beautifully about the terrain, offers deliciously dyspeptic observations...and is very funny on the sense of spiralling dislocation which arises from being confronted not just with unfamiliar behaviour but with 'an entirely inner architecture'."

MICK BROWN, 'Daily Telegraph'

McGrath has a fine, questing mind, a splendid eye for detail and a healthily cynical attitude. Confronted at every turn - in her deliciously sardonic picaresque travelogue through America's south-western desert states - by the strange, the sinister and the just plain barmy...she maintains a fine, dense and colourful narrative that brings the desert landscape and the loony-tune New Agers vividly to life."

NICK CURTIS, 'Financial Times'