Maugham has given infinite pleasure and left us a splendour of writing which will remain for as long as the written English word is permitted to exist

A formidable talent, a formidable sum of talents...precision, tact, irony and total absence of pomposity

Gripping and entertaining

A shrewd, still-relevant examination of women's roles, the nature of love and the manners and mores of marriage

Tim Parks’s brilliant new comedy is an invigorating twist on the male mid-life crisis novel… A very funny, very clever novel that shows with tremendous verve how life is so often a beleaguering collision between the absurd and the profound.

A frantic and minutely observed comedy of family, marriage, life and death. There is something in the synaptic twitch of Parks’s prose that brings us closer to the pressures and rhythms of a lived life than the work of any other contemporary writer I can think of

Blazingly funny, full of squirmy physical comedy and weaselly shilly-shallying

In Extremis is a novel about death and family and religious faith, about fidelity and infidelity… It is intelligent, comic, sad and at times disturbing… Parks has a remarkable talent for presenting the waywardness of thought… Good fiction makes you think and feel at the same time. This novel does that very well, at times comically, at times distressingly.

A tense, believable black comedy

Beyond the fierce and questioning intelligence are both humour and artfully constructed and invariably gripping plots

This is what a novel should be - gutsy, moving, funny, tragic, true – and with a syntax to die for. Tim Parks is in a league of his own. He makes every other English author of his generation look lame. In Extremis, in exacting detail, depicts the naked truth of marriage and aging, sex and death, family. Brilliant, brutal and all too quick – like life.

A master of emotional complexity

In Extremis is simply spellbinding and quite unique in my reading experience; very funny and very existential, compact and chatty, complicated and raw. Parks has written a masterpiece.

A thrillingly unsentimental—thrilling because unsentimental—meditation on every aspect and orifice of the human body.

Parks writes with wit and intelligence

A writer of considerable intelligence and great technical skill...tremendously readable

An exceptionally acute observer of modern life

In Extremis is by turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking. Structured with subtle intricacy, superbly controlled, and emotionally intelligent, this is a book to love

The Parks remains one of Britain’s most seriously under-celebrated novelists… In Extremis is often hilarious… The humour, clever asides, effortless plotting, astute characterisation, sense of everyday chaos and compelling readability will come as no surprise to his seasoned readers, yet the telling achievement of what is his finest book to date lies in its unexpected tenderness and beauty… Intuitive and humane, funny and sad – as real as life and death, as is Thomas Sanders, warts and all. This likely Man Booker contender is a British novel possessed of a sophisticated European resonance

The dreamlike quality of the stories in Men Without Women is undoubtedly one of its chief attractions… Murakami’s womenless men live in perpetual daydreams, a state of mind often prompted by a loss of some kind… Murakami’s latest is a hypnotising study of male loneliness

Potent storytelling and a generous cast of minor yet memorable characters… make for a helter-skelter read that’s clever, comic and pulsing with humanity

Thematically taut and compulsively paced.

A very good novel of anxiety, embarrassment and also, somehow, the depths of Englishness.

Marvellous, original and intelligent. Kunzru writes like a master storyteller... There's simply nothing [he] couldn't manage in prose

Publisher's description. Electrifying, subversive and wildly original, White Tears is a ghost story and a love story, a story about lost innocence and historical guilt. This unmissable novel penetrates the heart of a nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge and exploitation, and holding a mirror up to the true nature of America today.

Compulsively readable, masterly - a tour de force

Riveting from the very first page, I was completely addicted... A literary thriller and a timely, unsparing excavation of the very real spectre of race in America's past and present. White Tears is proof that Kunzru is one of the finest novelists of his generation...

Hari Kunzru is an incredibly versatile writer who is alert to the inequalities in the world... Powerful and complex, White Tears is a novel about abuses of wealth and power. Brilliantly orchestrated, unforgettable and devastating

Hari Kunzru is one of our most important novelists

Kunzru's engagingly wired prose and agile plotting sweep all before them

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