[Goodman] skillfully entwines the past and present, the mundane and magical, love and loss, to spin a beautifully nuanced and sensuous tale rooted in legend and lore

Outrageously funny . . . will have you in stitches

Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. After Kafka's and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature

He has created a body of work of luminous power: ironic, intellectually playful, dense and strange

Shows Saramago to be a novelist of the grandest sort...it is a dramatic work of great philosophical weight, filtered through a refined contemplative intelligence

A study in symmetry, possessing a peculiar charm, humour and wisdom uniquely its own