A whirlwind of an adventure- and has everything - myths, marvels, monsters, murders, mysteries

Here is the Eco of The Name of the Rose...poised, mischievous and erudite, the fruit of extraordinary knowledge

[Eco] has given us, in the book's central character, a grand and sympathetic figure in the tradition of Candide and Sancho Panza

Mixing pages of intellectual discussion and exhilarating comedy - further reveals Eco's practically inexhaustible erudition

A richly entertaining novel

Wonderfully touching

The Old Wives Tale is the shining example of realism - the novel which...neither idealises nor caricatures

This novel...established Arnold Bennett's reputation as one of the great English novelists of the early 20th century

This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times

Radical, dazzling . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith's re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains

Ms. Smith's writing is inventive and delighted. She cannot help being exuberant

Inventive, playful, compassionate. An immensely enjoyable read

I was utterly transported by Ali Smith's How to Be Both, a novel built from two stories that speak across six centuries. I'm about to read it for the fourth time

Smith is dazzling in her daring. Her inventive power pulls you through, gasping, to the final page

Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today

She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense

Smith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own . . . How to be both reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a trance

Utterly contemporary and vividly historical

Smith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challenging

One of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully

A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a jeu d'esprit about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist.

A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels

Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappoint

Brilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh