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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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..."

"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..."

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

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

"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...."

"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..."

"There are many things in The Topeka School that are more eloquent than words..."

"this compilation of his favourite funny stories offers material both hilarious and unusual..."