Grass is one of the few great writers in Europe today

Günter Grass releases, against the grain of history, a troop of obsessional characters, armed often with magical or at least disconcerting powers, who gnaw through the madness of the Third Reich and the chaos of the collapse, into the complacent fabric of modern West Germany

Forty years of twentieth-century German history observed through a massive fable about men and dogs. Mad, Gothic, repetitive and bitterly funny

Marina Warner's fiction has a slow, dreamy quality that is at once pleasurable and slightly sinister... This is a moving book, and a very bookish one

Mythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. . . . The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice.

For ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 'As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance'