I loved Richard Russo's Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls, a moving, brilliantly imagined and intensely satisfying novel about the slow death of a small town: Russo's characters are as loveable and as exasperating as family

His natural grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion for his characters

Like Anne Tyler, Russo is interested in how people rub along; in kindness and responsibility; in cutting slack without being asked. In the Empire Grill he has created a place so involving that not only can you see and smell it, but you start to feel a bit left out of the gin rummy. Russo makes an enormous job of story-telling look effortless. He is, in all the best senses of the word, a natural

Richard Russo can write like Edith Wharton leavened with a touch of David Lodge

Russo's command of his story is unerring... He satisfies every expectation without lapsing into predictability, and the last section of the book explodes with surprises...One of the best novelists around

Another fine performance... This is a big novel with a full canvas of human passions. Russo, a humane and traditional teller of truths, sustains his story and his readers

Russo writes with a warm, vibrant humanity

The world of Empire Falls is at least distantly related to those of John Cheever's Wapshot novels... an unpretentious master of fictional technique whose deeper wisdom expresses itself in the distinctive fallibility, decency, humor, and grace of the indisputably, irresistibly real people he puts on the page

Russo's inimitable blend of Eudora Welty, Anne Tyler and Booth Tarkington, removed to declining New England and graced with surprises all his own, makes for terrific reading, fast, funny and illuminating

A twisted paranoid version of our world... so even if the suspicion sometimes lingers that Palahniuk is like a hip uncle tring to impress the kids with his capacities fo taboo-breaking and imaginative riffs, he still presents something that we all yearn for

As silly and brilliant as the others

Ever since Fight Club...Chuck Palahniuk has enjoyed a reputation as a down-dirty, cultish kind of writer with his finger on the pulse

This is a book to read by the fireside, to be swept along in, to realise - with a start - that hours have gone by...In other words, to rediscover the lost-in-another-world joy of reading. And this book really IS a joy...my favourite book of the year so far

A delicious, highly intelligent page-turner... With clever, confident plotting and meticulous period details, this is an engrossing and deeply satisfying read

As you would expect from somebody steeped in Victorian fictional history, Taylor rarely puts a foot wrong...the colourful events which take place on the Downs should delight any racing enthusiast

Taylor’s love and understanding of Victorian melodrama is put to good use in this tangibly detailed and deliciously written pastiche centred on an Epsom Derby swindle

This is a fictional world in which daughters are ready to bump off their fathers, husbands to exploit their wives, and everyone is happy to chance their assets on the wheel of fortune. It’s a novel that will keep you gripped until the very last furlong

It is a detective story as gripping as the Victorian novels that inspired it, and is written with narrative flair and a terrific sense of fun

Derby Day will be hard to put down... As ever with Taylor, literary complexities lurk under the smooth surface of a stylish page-turner

De Witt has intelligence, wit and unusual stylistic bravery

An ambitious, colossal debut novel

DeWitt pushes enjoyably but firmly against (and sometimes beyond) the unknown capabilities of the reader