For this wonderful celebration and lament creates its own hunger, its own momentum

The way Mr. Healy has orchestrated things, the story of Catherine and Jack -- and of Ireland -- has two distinct outcomes. Both are beautiful, sad and convincing.

A century after his birth, the gothic surrealism of Peake's fantasy world still attracts new fans

Superbly powerful... A rich, evocative book

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance