I felt like this was written just for me, and I think everyone will feel this way

THE most wonderful, funny, clever, charming, evocative book.

A book for people who love books, by a person who loves books. Bookworms unite (or just sit in our separate corners and read!)

A delicously nostalgic treat that will make you want to pull out all those old favourites again

Artfully evokes that particular magic of reading as a child… Deliciously unrepentant, Mangan’s Bookworm makes a timely case not just for how vital reading is, but also for rereading books as a child, and how reading remains consoling, fortifying and, sometimes, magical.

A wonderful romp through the pages of childhood, illuminated by wisdom, humour and enthusiasm.

What Mangan does brilliantly is express the experience of reading and articulate the emotional connections we make with stories. She understands how books become entwined in our lives and help us make sense of the world. You don’t need to have enjoyed the same books as she has to recognise the pure, life-affirming joy of reading that Bookworm celebrates so eloquently.

Lucy Mangan has enough comic energy to power the National Grid... We need this new memoir about her childhood of being a bookworm. It's enchanting.

To read Lucy Mangan’s memoir of growing up bookish is to be taken back to a time in life when reading wasn’t merely a gentle pleasure or mild obligation but an activity as essential as breathing.

Anyone who has ever preferred books to life will recognise Lucy Mangan as a kindred spirit. Her moving, funny, honest and superbly-written memoir about how childhood reading shapes our personalities, memories and chances could not be more timely or more needed in an age of library closures, embattled Humanities teaching and Philistinism.

Lucy Mangan's passionate, amusing and nostalgic reflection upon her favourite children’s books deserves to become as much of a classic as the novels she revisits.

A witty and thorough history of reading for children from the 17th century to the present day. Fiercely unsentimental and often funny, it's a memoir that will strike a ringing chord with anyone who spent most of their childhood glued to a book.

Deft, warm and beautifully balanced. Made me smile. Made me glow. Made me think again and again.

Funny, nostalgic and super-interesting… Warm, witty and a must-read for every bookworm.

The Guardian columnist has composed an enthusiastic love letter to childhood reading, and the classic books that have shaped many young lives, as well as providing a resource and guide on how to build a children’s library

Funny and engaging.

Bookworm is for anyone who longed to be on Kirrin Island with the Famous Five, slip through a back of a wardrobe into Narnia or will always think fondly of the penis named Ralph in Judy Blume’s Forever

A warm, witty story about stories and the way they shape us.

Lucy Mangan’s passionate, amusing and nostalgic reflection upon her favourite children’s books deserves to become as much of a classic as the novels she revisits.

Enchanting.

Joyful and heart-warming.

Entertaining and hugely engaging… An entirely inspiring read.

… like a heated but enjoyable discussion with a best friend bookworm.

A love letter to the books we all read as children.

[W]ise and witty… all the time Mangan has the ability to be ceaselessly and apparently effortlessly funny

If you're a book lover of any form then you will almost certainly get something from this book… you will look fondly back on the books of your childhood too

In Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm…childhood books are brought vividly to life, as are the remembered pleasures of first encountering them

Lucy Mangan's funny, warm Bookworm is personal and universal in the way that the very best books are

Beautifully narrated, Bookworm brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story

An enchanting, nostalgic, comfort read

[With] deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream.

Ottessa Moshfegh pulls off an unlikely premise, demonstrating once again the unsettling energy, daring plotting and biting observations that have earned her literary prizes and praise from the start of her career.

Moshfegh’s managed to produce a funny, acerbic and captivating novel from both a heroine we ought to hate (a rich kid bored with the life of plenty) and a plot that’s almost tautologically sedate (nap after blackout after nap after blackout)… it’s invigorating… what raises this book above the masses is Moshfegh’s wit, her invention, and her unflinching eye for the grotesque; anything could happen to our narrator and we’d keep on reading, because Moshfegh would make it sound unerringly interesting.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a merciless comedian of vanity and frailty.

Intoxicating… [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] is the boldest literary statement of passive resistance since Herman Melville’s scrivener… It speaks to Moshfegh’s storytelling skills that an account of someone sleep for a year is as gripping as My Year of Rest and Relaxation reads.

The writing is precise and hilarious, as well as disturbing and dark.

Moshfegh’s characters are often so funny in and about their unhappiness that we don’t want them to escape it, or not yet… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is written in multiple modes at once: comedy and tragedy and farce, blurring into one another, climbing on top of one another.

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel.

I love this book. It's funny, I find it intriguing and Moshfegh has a dark voice. I started reading her and thought, 'This sounds like a female Bret Easton Ellis'.

Enthralling. The voice is compelling and witty, drawing one into the experience.

The black comedy draws you in and the mysteries, twists and turns keep you there.

Whip-smart and bleakly funny.

The most inspiring novel of recent years.

Depressing, dystopian, dry and dark, but also strangely comforting and full of the joy of innocent fantasy of withdrawing from a hostile world.

Moshfegh's stunning 2018 novel has a haunting ending... [and] relentlessly vicious humour.

This razor sharp satirical novel has achieved near mythical status... [a] compelling and clever take on a female character that isn't afraid to speak her mind

Ottessa is one of our newest, most dazzling, daring and outrageous voices in literature

The evocation of night journeys through the fog-bound city and along mysterious canals and forgotten rivers is spellbinding.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I’d pick it up again in a heartbeat.

Ondaatje’s prose is beautiful, and he successfully builds suspense and tension without seeming too heavy-handed

Michael Ondaatje is at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types

Brilliant dramatic tale

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating. Warlight is a meditation on the purpose and possibilities of storytelling

[T]his elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shift of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… It's a masterful book

- So finely are his sentences constructed that you find yourself holding your breath lest you inadvertently disturb their symmetry

[C]ompulsively and grippingly readable… Ondaatje is a marvelous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination

For the lyrical strength of the prose alone, a new Michael Ondaatje novel is always a treat

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room was a hot favourite on this year's Booker shortlist, and it's easy to see why… Kushner's atmospheric writing is compelling to the last.

Kushner’s writing is the most marvellous I read this year… time and again I found myself rereading paragraphs of The Mars Room for her perfectly turned sentences, the music of her prose