Sue Townsend was simply one of the funniest writes who ever wore socks, and her Adrian Mole series is a satirical gem that follows her hapless protagonist from adolescence to middle age, revealing some sharp home truths about British society in the process. At thirty-nine and a half, Adrian is convinced he's too young to have prostrate problems. He's wrong. If anyone can shake a comic first at cancer, it's Townsend.

Couldn't be funnier

An exquisite social comedy

In this book the comedy is all the sharper, and more poignant, for its melancholy contrasts, the emotional danger and the sense that time is always running out.

Like Evelyn Waugh's Captain Grimes, Adrian is 'one of the immortals' and the series of his diaries the comic masterpiece of our time

Sue Townsend has always had an unflinching sense of humour - the more incongruously awful the situation, the more she can make us laugh...this is a seriously lovely book.

This hilarious and poignant tale of Adrian Mole's early middle age reaffirms that Sue Townsend has created 'one of the great comic characters of our time'

The funniest person in the world

This feel-good read follows a colourful cast. ****

Sex, lies and secrets - this is chick-lit at its very best

This is a book for grown-up fans of children's fantasy and would also appeal to those who loved Donna Tartt's The Secret History . Highly recommended

The Magicians is the most dazzling, erudite and thoughtful fantasy novel to date. You'll be bedazzled by the magic but also brought short by what it has to say about the world we live in

The Magicians is a spellbinding, fast-moving, dark fantasy book for grownups that feels like an instant classic. I read it in a niffin-blue blaze of page turning, enthralled by Grossman's verbal and imaginative wizardry, his complex characters and most of all, his superb, brilliant inquiry into the wondrous, dangerous world of magic

The Magicians is Harry Potter as it might have been written by John Crowley...This is one of the best fantasies I've read in ages

The author has taken all that is held dear in the fantasy genre, reverently (most of the time) tipping the hat to Rowling, Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin and others, and shown it from a completely different and unique angle

...a gripping fantasy thriller that will please all the older Harry Potter fans out there

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