One of Vonnegut's best novels

There can be few [novelists], if any, with as much good humour and generosity... As in many of Vonnegut's novels, the career of his central character matches his own at several crucial points, and this gives his amiable fictions their sharp sting of the real... A tour de force that Vonnegut handles in a masterly way.

Burnside's prose is exquisite and he dissects his themes with delicacy to produce a novel resonant with poetic menace

An exceptionally sinister book... It is the story of Luke, whose experiments into the nature of human language are recounted with all the beguiling reasonableness of the highly intelligent madman... The horror is tempered and fine-tuned by the exceptional beauty of Burnside's writing... In Luke, Burnside has produced one of the most chilling voices in recent fiction

My favourite book of the year

It is hard to better Jean Plaidy when she is in form...both elegant and exciting as she steers a stylish path through the feuding Plantagenets.

Outstanding

Jean Plaidy conveys the texture of various patches of the past with such rich complexity

A flawless jewel

Foreign Affairs is probably Alison Lurie’s best novel to date, certainly it is a triumph, and much of its success stems from its accomplished plotting. Lurie has known from the first how to tell a story brilliantly through the consciousness of a woman who in type and circumstance resembles the author herself

The first chapter is one of the most captivating in any recent novel I have read

Lurie weaves a characteristically sharp-eyed, deftly ironic comedy of cultural collisions and collusions that rightly won her comparisons to Henry James and Edith Wharton

I am convinced that Alison Lurie's fiction will long outlast that of many currently more fashionable names. There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy over the years. Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton

A brilliant novel - her best I think. The book is a triumph, and not simply of style...Foreign Affairs is witty, acerbic, and sometimes fiendishly clever

Warm, clever and funny