"Two boys from different backgrounds bond as 1960s Ceylon heads for disaster..."

"the conclusion of the book is, in its bleak way, impressive..."

"the Lee Child of passive-aggressive stand-offs over how best to roast potatoes..."

"One of the joys of reading Renko is seeing Russia through Smith’s eyes and Renko’s cases...."

"her latest collection is up there with the best..."

"A somewhat heavy-handed satirical work..."

"it has a madness and monomania that compel..."

"Nino Haratischvili serves up a family saga set against the turbulent history of Georgia..."

"There is writing of a glancing brilliance here, and an emotional and sensory acuity well matched to the terrain..."

"She is especially good on difficult relationships, and the gathering trap of liberal identity politics..."

"It is Flanery’s funniest and most entertainingly melodramatic novel. ..."

"Strout brings her characters to life by fully engaging them in the very human folly of trying to get people right, and setting them up for failure, time and time again...."

"Mary Costello’s Ulysses-inspired novel is ‘more pleasure than challenge’..."

"This is a most strange and tormented story, part psychoanalytic confession and part meditation on man’s cruel relationship with nature..."

"On Swift Horses is worth reading for the poetry alone..."

"There are no happy endings in this nastily funny phantasmagoria set in a warped version of England..."

"the best so far of an unmissable series..."

"Grandmothers makes for absorbing, undemanding reading..."

"for the most part he writes with wonderful delicacy and multiplicity..."

"This collection is luminous and breathtaking, varied and delightful and surprising..."

"Handke’s politics trivialise Bosnian suffering, yet his writing also gives words to the voiceless ordeals long considered too mundane for literature..."

"An extraordinary collection of surreal tales takes in time travel, molluscs and monks..."

"“This Is Happiness” is as full of detours and backward glances as it is of forward motion..."

"(a) darkly transcendent novel filled with phantasmagoric visions, body horror and tortured beings traversing a blasted desert hellscape..."

"The strength of O’Brien’s work, apart from lyricism, has always been its reliable specificity...."

"feels at once more real – because less cartoony – and more sentimental than her earlier books..."

"Here really is a world, thrillingly imagined and under the surface entirely like our own..."

" a shrewd, skilful tale of loneliness, the search for meaning and a place in the world, and the problems of truly relating to another human being..."