A woman’s lot was shocking in the 1850s as this Cooksonlike saga brilliantly describes... Have some tissues handy!

With characters it is impossible not to care about ... this is storytelling at its very best

An emotional and moving epic you won't forget in a hurry

Gritty and uplifting, it's a tale of triumph over adversity

The Waiting Hours vividly portrays England during the Second World War, revealing the role ordinary women played behind the scenes. If you’ve enjoyed Dean’s wartime sagas so far, this should be next on your list.

Touching, poignant and warm storytelling

Saga fans will love The Waiting Hours and I would definitely recommend buying it as soon as possible

The characters feel real and authentic

I just could not put it down

Ellie Dean is such a fabulous storyteller. She never fails to deliver and I greatly Look forward to the next instalment.

[White Teeth] established a model for how to make sense-and art-out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century

A dramatic, intimate chronicle of a family implosion set in unsettling times

If there is a more brilliant writer than Tóibín working today, I don't know who that would be

This is a novel about the way the members of a family keep secrets from one another, tell lies and make mistakes.. .

Tóibín's retelling is governed by compassion and responsibility, and focuses on the horrors that led Clytemnestra to her terrible vengeance. Her sympathetic first-person narrative makes even murder, for a moment, seem reasonable (...) Tóibín's prose is precise and unadorned, the novel's moments of violence told with brutal simplicity. But its greatest achievement is as a page-turner. In a tale that has ended the same way for thousands of years, Tóibín makes us hope for a different outcome

[An] intense, thought-provoking and original novel . . . Toibin's book transforms this ancient story into a lyrical, melancholy meditation on closeted desire, which implicitly comments on the aftermath of the Irish Troubles'

Graphic, vicious, beautiful retelling of ancient myths.... Ultimately the book is a stark, timeless and brilliantly rendered tale of power in a world, as ever, riven by conflict.

In a novel describing one of the Western world's oldest legends, in which the gods are conspicuous by their absence, Tóibín achieves a paradoxical richness of characterisation and a humanisation of the mythological, marking House Of Names as the superbly realised work of an author at the top of his game.

A spellbinding adaptation of the Clytemnestra myth, House of Names considers the Mycenaen queen in all her guises: grieving mother, seductress, ruthless leader - and victim of the ultimate betrayal.

A haunting story, largely because Tóibín tells it in spare, resonant prose...

A Greek House of Cards... Just like Heaney at the end of his Mycenae lookout, Toibin's novel augurs an era of renewal that comes directly from the cessation of hostilities.

The book's mastery of pacing and tone affirm the writer as one of our finest at work today.

A daring, and triumphant return, to the Oresteia... bleakly beautiful twilight of the Gods.

It couldn't have been done better

A visceral reworking of Oresteia

The escalation of violence and desire for revenge has deliberate echoes of the Irish Troubles