Arthur Koestler has developed a descriptive power which is at once irresistible and unbearable...It is brilliantly done. Not the least impressive thing is the incidental picture, casually built up by a touch of colour here and there, of the city itself, with its polyglot population of every nation.

His attitude is profoundly and honourably intellectual in that he sees life as a series of mental and moral problems to be solved, or at least to be clearly stated...I have criticised Arrival and Departure not as a current novel by which criterion the faintest doubt of its supremacy would be out of place, but as the enduring work of art which I believe it may prove to be. Its qualities are not only of a high but of an extremely rare order.

Superbly poised between the magic of innocence and the melancholy of experience

Michael Ondaatje's impressive new novel, containing dreams and fantasy between a ship's flanks...is, in the most etymological way, a wonderful novel: one full of wonders

Atmospheric, elegiac and at times, like Ondaatje's most famous novel, The English Patient, unbearably poignant

I love this book: the boys running wild on the long sea voyage, the slow revelation of the adult world they don't fully understand, the loss of the past and the beginning of the future, and even a sort of thriller in there! And the beauty of the sentences. Perfection

Wondrous

Part memoir, complete masterpiece... Written with tenderness, wisdom and sharp emotional recall, this is an exuberant elegy to innocence

Grave and playful at the same time, beautifully written and moving

It's impossible to explain through any discussion of plot and character the hypnotic brilliance of The Cat's Table. The joy of boyhood and the darkness at its edges are conveyed in sense of extraordinary imagination... It is entirely...well, Ondaatje-esque

Vividly follows the passage from Ceylon to England of an 10 year-old boy on a line full of eccentric, mysterious passengers

Ondaatje's prose, flawless as ever, deals with loneliness, friendship and pre-pubescent love

Translators give their wits and craft selflessly in service of others' work; this is a triumph of fidelity and unpretentiousness.

Tom McCarthy's C... a novel blazing with energy and, for all its postmodern ambitions, a rich, old-fashioned yarn

I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy's C also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize.

McCarthy's high-voltage writing runs through the reader like a charge.

New readers could grasp just how boldly he has tried to balance sumptuous period-fiction prose with a mischievous desire to sabotage his chosen form.

An exciting, revealing and touching story

The novel's interest (or lack thereof) lies mainly in its stubborn refusal of anything resembling a narrative payoff...I loved it, right down to the prose, which, unspooling in a vaguely menacing present-continuous, sounds like screenplay instructions to a set designer

A dazzlingly agile novel about the interconnectedness of things

Entertaining as well as ambitious

McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity