"...brilliantly strange..."

"an intensive reading experience..."

"There is a cure for pandemic gloom. What you need to do is read a funny novel about an even more deadly plague, the Black Death of the 14th century...."

"Immaculately constructed, acidly observed and gripping from start to finish, A Burning is a brilliant debut...."

"At times, the novel seems less a portrait of a relationship than a splice of two stories on the same theme..."

"Reynolds is a former freestyle snowboarder with an intimate knowledge of the sport and the rivalry it inspires..."

"At the heart of this latest novel from Booker winner Richard Flanagan there is a powerful tale of a family trying to decide whether to prolong the life of a dying relative, but some of the more fantastical elements seem out of kilter..."

"The former Granta Young British Novelist lays himself bare in a moving account of a terminated pregnancy..."

"a caustic, candid and convincing debut..."

"A new book from Harper is always an event..."

" Like its subject, The Death of Francis Bacon is tricky, wicked and wonderfully weird..."

"The Chinese writer’s novel about death and loss is meandering and muddy rather than clear..."

"Modiano’s stories circle, perhaps obsessively, around the same unhealed wounds..."

"beyond gruesome yet the horror is tempered by gallows humour..."

"The novel sounds all the tried and tested noir notes — the brutal, rain-drenched city, the divorce, the obsessive work and professional conflicts — but it makes them chime..."

"an original and absorbing piece of work..."

"Terraforming Mars was never so blue-collar..."

"scalpel-sharp and oddly moving..."

"wanders promiscuously from science fiction to fantasy to historical fiction and back again, jumbling expectations as it goes..."

"one of those exasperating books in which things seem to almost happen..."

"dazzlingly clever..."

"combines crime fiction with elements of gothic horror, set in and around a creepy village churchyard in Sussex..."

"There’s no disgrace in being formulaic when the formula is good... ripping entertainment from start to finish...."

"izzing with revolutionary fervour..."

"Jones’ debut novel is a marvel..."

"a gripping and sharply comic account..."

"the collection feels fully coherent by the end..."

"Sharp exploration of privilege in modern America..."

" told with such authentic detachedness that you could almost miss it..."

"a bold novel addressing timely and controversial issues..."

" a gripping and thoughtful novel, taut with narrative suspense and brimming with emotional insight..."

"hits you right in the feels..."

"Pantomime misanthropy is tempered with bursts of sweetness in the secondhand bookseller’s latest dispatches from Wigtown..."

"plenty to applaud but easy to get lost..."

"This scientific analysis of humour says it may have evolved to boost sex appeal..."

"The juggle is familiar, but the take is fresh. ..."

"this celebration of amateur dramatics shows we've always been a theatre-loving country..."

"Jilly always makes the reader see through her eyes..."

"(a) fascinating portrait of a comedy genius..."

"Bloom’s memoir is somewhat hit-and-miss despite entertaining moments...."

"Hornby has built a career on capturing emotional nuance..."

" this charming, warm-hearted book proves just what an intelligent, quick-witted woman Claudia is..."

"The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. ..."

"Beautifully observed and full of swipes at the inhabitant of the White House, it is hugely entertaining...."

"essential reading for fans of the Big Yin..."

"Human-sized bunnies roam Britain in a dystopian satire on middle-class complacency..."

"Dostoevsky in Love is beautifully crafted and realised, but it is the great love that Christofi feels for his subject that makes this such a moving book...."

"A rebellious woman’s memoir about her life under the Taliban is moving and gripping..."

"I would recommend to any fluent person trying to understand the tribulations of disfluency, and to any disfluent person who feels that he or she is enduring them alone......"

"The great writer’s passion and resilience resonate anew in Eddie S Glaude Jr’s timely, powerful study..."

"The Norwegian literary superstar takes pot shots at his critics and cancel culture, and doesn’t care who he offends..."

"In his new memoir, Britain’s most famous fraudster explains how he conned as much as £30 million out of banks and shops..."

"Suffused with a wry humour, the essays are aimed at anyone interested in how fiction works..."

"A new biography of the artist is both comprehensive and compelling..."

"The courageous woman who took up the cause of men abandoned to the condition..."

"packs in a great number of her words..."

"Smarsh’s book is excellent..."

"offers up some memorable insights but it is mostly a reliable and business-like account of a life in sport..."

"Thomas Otte asks whether our then-Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was culpable for failing to avert war..."

"Wheeler uses her cross-examination skills to draw a fascinating tale out of her mother in a book that's part travelogue, part biography..."

"Tomaselli gives us an intimate portrait of the passionate, life-loving woman behind the public moralist..."

"Pitzer’s prose is robust, clear and sometimes elegant..."

"the threads are left dangling, never interwoven to create the hoped for tapestry...."

"The Commonwealth of Cricket is a book that should not be ignored..."

"A look at how the label went from eccentric outsider to defining the culture of an era..."

"Artist pens eccentric memoir chronicling his adventures around the world ..."

"Intertextual monologues that bring Wagner’s epic ‘Ring’ cycle into the modern age..."

"she is as incisive when considering the East Berlin, now demolished, where she grew up..."

"A gentle memoir by a romantic journalist, who recounts what happened when, seeking to honour her father, she agreed to consider a selection of ‘suitable’ husbands..."

"This amusing memoir cast a wry literary eye over the cult-like world of Silicon Valley..."

"less about death and more a celebration of life written in a captivating, intelligent style that is sprinkled with black humour..."

"n Inventory of Losses uses the fine detail of what no longer is to explore the world of what might have been..."

"canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission..."

"The first section of The Yellow House is gloriously written history, made intimate and vital by the voices of Broom’s older relatives..."

"There​ is, I suppose, something heroic in Wenger’s refusal, in the face of so much opprobrium, to adapt to the new football,..."

"The portrait here is by no means hagiographic..."

" January 1, 2021 Read this issue IN THIS REVIEW AN ELEPHANT IN ROME Bernini, the Pope and the making of the Eternal City 224pp. Pallas Athene. £19.99. Loyd Grossman Acheerful bricolage of biography, art history, trivia and travelogue..."

"His innate dignity and his decency shine through this book...."

"An important biography of a controversial, unforgettable man..."

"A detailed account of a century of scandalous Byrons..."