An adventure story...extravagantly enthralling

It's a rich, complicated, eccentric gumbo of a book... An epic tale of the restless journeys of the mind

Ortega's energy and relentless inventiveness succeed in creating a seamless and utterly compelling blend of the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. A Bolaño-like encyclopaedia...the literary equivalent of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities... One of the most original novels to have appeared in Spain in recent years, Desolation Island is ultimately a magnificent tale of travel

Desolation Island has all the characteristics of a postmodern classic...has all the elements of the classic adventure novel, from The Odyssey to Moby Dick

An ambitious and successful novel that confronts the reader with important questions: love, death, identity, evil...

Rarely has fiction been so truthful. Rarely has reading been so vital and so absorbing

A wonderful novel... We are between Odysseus' journey, the kernel of the epic novel, and Melville's Moby Dick... This novel aims to go to the heart of literature, to take up once more the almost extinguished call of ancient and contemporary heroes

A good old-fashioned mariner’s adventure – though bursting with postmodern strangeness

Murakami's exquisitely simple prose and deft evocation of the surreal are captivating and sublime

The mysteries are never tainted by explanation, merely beautifully described, delivering a hypnotic read

Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility

Vintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels

[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done

Murakami's most famous coming of age novel of love, loss and longing

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed.

[A] treat . . . Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done.

One of the most poignant and evocative novels I have ever read

Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates heartbreak and loss of faith

Quinn brings the period in question vividly to life: his research is exemplary, and his subject absorbing

All the ingredients of an upmarket page-turner

Ambitious, gripping and disturbingly well done

Beyond its splendid feel for the era’s chat and patter, the novel pits philanthropy and opportunism, ideals and selfishness, bracingly at odds

This novel is refreshingly different and contains a cornucopia of wonderful material and evocative descriptions

The best book I’ve read in ages… You have to read it.