'Almost impossible to put down...a miracle of telling'

'A powerful epic narrative...an ambitious novel, and a tragic, haunting parable...here, for a change, is a sequel that counts'

'You don't have to be a believer to find Russell's portrait of courage and endurance and humanity (among aliens as well as humans) both moving and exhilarating'

Beautifully and evocatively written

powerful: it shows the grief that overwhelms a parent at the death of a child and...the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a superficially happy family...There is no denying Pears' achievement in the character of Owen, a raw, desperate man even before he is filled with grief, and his deeply poetic descriptions of an old-fashioned life on the land.

A story of love and fatherhood that almost seems Hardyesque...set against the bucolic splendour of flashback scenes...[Owen's] kidnapping of his children may be shocking but it feels somehow legitimate, and his animal hunger for fatherhood is moving...Landed is a turbulent, haunting story, which forces the reader to examine different perceptions of goodness and responsibility. It explores the fragility of family life, using this to reflect on the opposition between society and the natural world. Pears's prose is quietly mellifluous, particularly when evoking the pastoral, and the multi-perspective device supports the plot well...Landed draws us painfully into Owen's predicament, his teetering between salvation and disaster.

A shocking book...irresistibly readable

Darkly impressive

A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right

It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable

The Kindly Ones has been hailed as the return of the great European realistic novel.

I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell's much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it...a magnificent achievement

An immense novel...The depth of detail is astounding and authentic

A masterpiece

An extremely disturbing novel

A remarkable and controversial novel

Jonathan Littell veers between brilliance and bathos...

Grotesque, dismaying, chilling in its focus on the fine detail of barbarism, this epic of evil is also addictively readable

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned