[Barnes] is always clever, often original and unusually funny... Elizabeth Finch...offers plenty to chew on...with barely a sentence in it that doesn't have some nutritional value.

A singular tale.

Everything Barnes writes changes everything... Barnes's latest novel, must be read at least twice for the full force of its voltage to be felt... A cryptic crossword of a novel, Elizabeth Finch is a tricksier and even brainier version of Flaubert's Parrot.

The book's central and most enthralling section...deals with a figure EF esteemed as a kindred spirit: Julian the Apostate... A bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition... [Elizabeth Finch] also celebrates the cast of mind Barnes most prizes. A connoisseur and master of irony himself, he fills this book with instances of its exhilarating power.

Elizabeth Finch ranks alongside Barnes' best.

A new novel from Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes is always a literary event, and Elizabeth Finch...is not different. Wistful, thought-provoking stuff.

This is...Julian Barnes...in his best ambitious high concept mode, serious and playful at once.

A surprisingly compelling novel... a thought-provoking book that plays with the relationship between author and reader.

Motherhood is subtitled A Novel, though it's one in which the boundaries between fiction and memoir are porous and constantly shifting… Heti is experimenting with literary form even as she wrestles with the form her adult life should take

Motherhood is a fiercely intelligent and probing read that delves deep into the fundamentals of procreating, motherhood and what it means to be a woman in today's world.

[Motherhood] embed[s] deeply philosophical questions into casual and familiar language… It is about the paralysis a person might feel when given the freedom to create, whether babies, books or oneself.

Motherhood is self-examination elevated to an art form… beautifully written and profound.

Illuminating . . . Intimate . . . Poignant.

Engrossing . . . Heti approaches the subject with an observer's curiosity.

This inquiry into the modern woman’s moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response - finally - to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I’ve read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself.

I’ve never seen anyone write about the relationship between childlessness, writing, and mother’s sadnesses the way Sheila Heti does. I know Motherhood is going to mean a lot to many different people - fully as much so as if it was a human that Sheila gave birth to - though in a different and in fact incommensurate way. That’s just one of many paradoxes that are not shied away from in this courageous, necessary, visionary book.

An emotionally complex novel about motherhood that isn't about children. An intricately constructed book based on games of chance. This feels new.

Reading this beautiful novel, I felt I was watching a brilliant mind invent new tools for thinking. Sheila Heti wrings revelation from the act of asking, again and again, in ever more challenging and innovative ways, impossible questions of existence. Motherhood is a thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving book.

I read this novel more quickly and eagerly than any I've read in ages. Sheila Heti's simple, elegant sentences invariably give pleasure; her thinking is incisive and wholly original as she grapples with the kind of unhappiness that many of us, myself included, prefer to distract ourselves from rather than look at squarely. Reading Motherhood forced me to become a little more honest with myself.

Here it finally is. A book for all of you who are considering having a baby, who had a baby, who didn’t have a baby, who didn’t want a baby, who don’t know what they want but the clock is ticking anyway. This topic is finally tackled as if it were the most important decision in your life. Because, um. How lucky are we that one of our foremost thinkers took this upon herself, for years, in real time, wrestling every day and living to tell. So fucking ready to live in the world this book will help make. Read and discuss, discuss, discuss.

With each of her novels, Sheila Heti invents a new novel form. Motherhood is a riveting story of love and fate, a powerful inspiration to reflect, and a subtle depiction of the lives of contemporary women and men, by an exceptional artist in the prime of her powers. Motherhood constitutes its own genre within the many-faceted novel of ideas. Heti is like no one else.

I think of Motherhood as a beautiful, natural, living thing - a rare tree in the car-filled parking lot of literature, offering aesthetic and sustainable pleasures while also bristling with multiple, helpful, compassionate functions in the world. The high stakes, complexity, intensity, playfulness, seriousness, and inter-dimensionality of Motherhood's synthesis of art and life, of the imagination and the universe, makes me excited about both life and literature. I recommend reading and rereading Motherhood.

Motherhood is a gesture towards honesty, bringing much that was dark into light. The book makes it more possible to think the decision, but also to dream, embody and feel it.

A celebration of life, expressed poignantly through her prose - which is playful, funny, ultimately moving.

[This] novel is astonishing

I found it totally addictive and read it [Motherhood] in one go

A thoughtful, frank novel... Intellectual yet conversational, it's a meditation on responsibility and freedom, and the purpose of life itself. I found it extremely moving

A warm-hearted exploration of the foibles and dynamics of family life

Tyler is a superb observer of family life... Heartbreak is deftly layered over a vibrant portrayal of the city, its codes and nuances

Anne Tyler is a wonderful storyteller and French Braid is another classic... Funny but hearthbreaking, too. I loved every single page

Anne Tyler's genius lies in her ability to make this unremarkable family so enthralling

Tyler is a genius at telling big stories with small details and this is an engrossing, fascinating family portrait

Gentle and comforting, but with a hidden core of desperate, cloying sadness, and is vintage Tyler

An astute, well-observed and compulsively readable saga

I adore her [Tyler] books. She’s written 24 novels and I’ve read every single one. She’s 81 and yet French Braid, her latest, is one of her very best

[A] brilliant, sensual, seductively plotted new novel... Hadley has written an extraordinary story about love and transformation.

Free Love is often deeply perceptive and affecting... it lets you imagine what it was like to wrestle with old and new ways of thinking in an age that shaped (and continues to shape) our own.

It's the 1960s and socialism, sex and nuclear anxiety have come crashing into the middle-class bubble Tessa Hadley novels usually operate so brilliant within.

A story about change and its limits, its beautifully judged ending will bring you to tears.

[An] acutely realised, deeply humane novel... Unmissable.

No novel published this year gave me more pleasure than Tessa Hadley's Free Love.

Nothing drew me in as conclusively as Free Love by Tessa Hadley, who is surely one of our most astute and deft observers of everyday lives.

Hadley's novels continue to get better and better - and this is her finest, most pleasurable yet... it's near enough the perfect present in book form

She is, in all her mastery of the craft, a writer's writer.