Ambitious

'The New York of City of Strangers is a lonely, violent place, shadowed by failure and the sins of the past, yet this is no simple neo-noir. There's depth and extension to the world Ian MacKenzie creates for his hero, and brilliant writing on every page. It's hard to believe this is a debut - and that much more exciting

A novel as grim as it is extraordinary...MacKenzie sets up a New York rampant with alienation and misunderstanding, and his visceral narrative,powered by taut prose and braced with sturdy philosophical and psychological underpinnings, is a winner

Excellent... Relentless... Powerful

A glum gem

Throughout the book Michelle de Krester's powerful imagination transmits an extraordinary energy to the narrative ... a remarkable achievement

Confident, meticulous plotting, her strong imagination and her precise, evocative prose. Like The Hamilton Case, The Lost Dog opens up rich vistas with its central idea and introduces the reader to a world beyond its fictional frontiers

The Lost Dog is a haunted work, it's characters uneasy ... de Kretser's characterisations are beautifully achieved, with even minor figures vividly realised

Clever, engrossing novel... beautifully shaded

The richness of her prose and the deceptive simplicity of her storytelling make this novel deserving of repeated readings

Scattered throughout are brief dramas or anecdotes, involving a variety of odd and often funny characters

she writes humorously and touchingly about the less portentous garish kitsch and personal clutter that they bring with them

Those childhood ghosts which linger into adulthood are sensitively conjured by Michelle de Kretser... This search for an animal becomes a ravishing search through the fears, hopes and attachments that make us human

Told with subtlety

Rose Tremain is an old-fashioned writer, in the best of ways: we care about her characters' sorrows and hope for their happiness

Tremain allows us to see our country's wonders and failings as if for the first time

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

The greatest comic writer ever

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

Sublime comic genius

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour