Celebrate Adrian Mole's 50th Birthday with this new edition of the fifth book in his diaries, where Adrian faces divorce, fatherhood and (short-lived) television stardom

One of the greatest comic creations. I can't remember a more relentlessly funny book

With the Mole books, Townsend has an unrivalled claim to be this country's foremost practising comic novelist

Adrian Mole really is a brilliant comic creation. Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself

Three cheers for Mole's chaotic, non-achieving, dysfunctional family. We need him

The funniest person in the world

This hilarious and poignant tale of Adrian Mole's early middle age reaffirms that Sue Townsend has created 'one of the great comic characters of our time'

The funniest person in the world

Slim and spectacular...My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times....

My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one

Her concise writing is a masterclass in deceptive simplicity...Strout writes with an exacting rhythm, with each word and clause perfectly placed and weighted and each sentence as clear and bracing as grapefruit. It's a small masterpiece

This short, simple, quiet novel wriggles its way right into your heart and stays there

A beautifully taut novel

Agleam with extraordinary psychological insights...delicate, tender but ruthless reveries

An eerie, compelling novel, its deceptively simple language is a 'slight rush of words' which hold much more than they seem capable of containing...This novel is about the need to create a story we can live with when the real story cannot be told...

Strout uses a different voice herself in this novel: a spare simple one, elegiac in tone that sometimes brings to mind Joan Didion's

This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it

An exquisitely written story...a brutally honest, absorbing and emotive read

Honest, intimate and ultimately unforgettable

Sympathetic, subtle and sometimes shocking

Plain and beautiful...Strout writes with an extraordinary tenderness and restraint

One of this year's best novels: an intense, beautiful book about a mother and a daughter, and the difficulty and ambivalence of family life

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz

Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is the best novel I've read for some time

An exquisite novel of careful words and vibrating silences

In this quiet, well observed novel, a mother and her mysteriously ill daughter rebuild their relationship in a New York hospital room. Deft and tender, it lingers in the mind

A worthy follow-up to Olive Kitteridge

I loved My Name is Lucy Barton: she gets better with each book

The standout novel of the year - a visceral account of the relations between mother and daughter and the unreliability of memory

In a brilliant year for fiction, I've admired the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly