A profoundly moving portrait of the region... Even now, years after I first read it, The Tree Where Man was Born seems imbued with precious vision

The skilled naturalist writer is almost as rare as the Congo peacock or the pygmy elephant - both subjects of the quest Peter Matthiessen conducts in African Silences. 'Skilled' is almost an insulting understatement for Matthiessen's sharply captivating prose

The Tree Where Man Was Born is a truly magnificent book that will be just as important 50 years from now

Terrific... Wolitzer's novels have always been exemplars of the motto that the personal is political... [Offers] many pleasing, surprising contrasts

It made me think about a woman's eternal problem of balancing the love she has for her children with what to do when they finally leave home. A serious, meaty read

Her books have this peculiar knack of being both very funny and uncomfortable, and her dissection of marital relationships is second to none

Wolitzer is as precise and rigorous an observer of social status as Tom Wolfe; she is as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler of female-male tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike.

Wolitzer perfectly captures her women's resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties.

Concerned mothers are talking about a new novel, The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

Her best novel to date... Writing with candour and humour, Wolitzer captures the neuroses of a rarefied mommy elite.

Wolitzer is wickedly, terrifically funny - a true delight

This might well make you see work in a new light

Smart and clever...Wolitzer could describe paint drying and make it funny, but there are hard questions posed in her portrait of these fortysomething urban females

A quite superb piece of work.

Sparky... modern... brilliant

[A] discomforting and acute tragicomedy ... The bleaker and darker his book becomes, the better it gets, building to a shocking and expertly executed conclusion. Tipped for the top on publication of his first novel, Lee here confirms his talent

For all painful events it covers, this is a joyful book. Lee educates us in the beautiful mess of humanity surrounding this tragic event. Joy is one of the best new novels this year.

A black comedy of exuberance and bite … original, and brilliantly executed; the characters’ voices … ventriloquised with flair … This is the wittiest, most addictive piece of literary yuppie-bashing since Martin Amis’s Money. Lee is a writer to keep an eye on.

A major new voice in British fiction.

A brilliant book... Jonathan Lee is one of those rare, agile writers who can take your breath away.

[Joy] displays a real flair for narrative and characterisation…Highly accomplished…The closest comparison that can be made is with Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which shares a similarly bravura command of narrative voice…Exquisitely and surprisingly written…it proves that Lee is a significant talent and that his future work should be well worth awaiting.

Lee’s writing is witty and engaging, containing something of the wearied disgust of Raymond Chandler’s prose…These four voices confiding in the counsellor are entertainingly distinct…The novel’s outstanding achievement, however, is the central, spiralling narrative that Jonathan Lee threads among these personal accounts: the intimate story of how Joy came to fall, a forensic portrayal of despair that shows Lee to be an exceptional, brave prose stylist. The dark revelations in the book’s final pages are disturbing while not gratuitous, but Lee also allows some credible room for optimism among these cluttered lives. Funny and humane, Joy is an enormously impressive piece of storytelling

Lee's the real deal - a British writer on the cusp of greatness. This novel follows the aftermath of lawyer Joy Stephen's apparent suicide. The corporate and personal explode in a brilliant powerful dissection of modern Britain.

Jonathan Lee’s second novel, Joy charts the final day in the life of a high-flying young lawyer. Lee writes with extraordinary vividness, with prose so sharply defined it takes your breath away.

With its supple prose, ingenious structure, wit and slow-burn sympathy, Joy is a sly miracle of a novel.

[One] of Britain’s most exciting writers… I loved how Jonathan Lee’s Joy gradually unravels through different characters…The ending of Joy is brilliantly shocking. I finished it three weeks ago and it’s still playing on my mind… Something about Joy’s slow and brooding story really affected me…Lee manages to make every voice distinct…It is Joy’s complexity which keeps you reading…[A] wonderful book.

Lee constructs office scenes easily, weaving together numerous characters and dialogues with flair…the writing crackles.