Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read. Barnes is like a worldly, secular reincarnation of a medieval gloss-writer on sacred texts, and what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we think about what we think we know

You will want to read it again and again, and why not? - there's nothing around to touch it

There is more moral and intellectual fodder, and more jokes, here than you will read in a month of Sundays... storytelling and teaching which captivate, liberate, and above all, enchant

This is a novel like no other - provocative, superbly funny, a wonderful and most original work...gives the reader a sense of ebullient, whooping joy

A tale of love across the social divide in coastal Norfolk, with the edge of a crime novel . . . Split loyalties and the chasm between the young couple's life experiences make their enduring relationship a triumph. Their credible and tender sexual encounter is the calm before the storm, as for Romeo and Juliet

Knausgaard's Proustian attention to detail and scrupulous analysis of emotional nuance is almost maddening – but ultimately magnificent

Knausgaard continues masterfully

One of the most anticipated books of the year (the decade)

His devotees gobble each new volume with an eagerness previously reserved only for box sets of Borgen

Knausgaard transforms the personal and mundane into the universal and perennially significant... There is such depth of feeling beneath the vibrant exterior, such sense of the goodness present in human existence

Accessibly and punchily written, an intimate, determined and ultimately successful attempt to shape the tiny mundanities of life into something quite unexpectedly beautiful, compelling and substantial

Knausgaard is a writer strong enough to survive the hype... A masterpiece for the age of the selfie... Brutally frank about the frustrations of marriage, work and parenthood, it's often horrifying and deeply funny

Compelling

Astounding... A work of such sincerity that, to paraphrase Baudelaire, the paper shrivels and flares at the touch of his fiery pen

Free-form, fear-filled, densely descriptive…Norway’s biggest literary star since Ibsen… [Knausgaard] has no obvious superiors among the writers now available to an English-reading public