The Blue Hour is a magnificent novel that describes ten years of civil war and terrorism with lucidity and resonant fantasy.

One of the major novelists of his generation.

The legacy of the Peruvian government's bloody war against the Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerillas in the 1980s has informed much of the country's best modern fiction, from Mario Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes to Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April. Alonso Cueto’s fine, prize-winning debut novel stands in that tradition ... The conflation of Adrian’s personal trauma with his nation’s dark history is beautifully, delicately done.

The strength of the plot pivots on the lovers’ ambiguous feelings for one another: the intensity of their mismatched love and hatred is perfectly drawn. Cueto evokes the myriad of emotions … plausibly and effectively … Cueto manages to explore that quest both imaginatively and provocatively.

This is an intelligent novel … there are fine scenes, especially when Adrian travels north in search of Miriam and learns something of the horrors of the war between the government troops and the terrorists.

As absorbing for its sketches of Lima as for its story, this is a primer for both a nascent Latin American genre and a place dealing with near-history’s horrors.

Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto is one of the novelists spearheading his country’s literary renaissance, drawing on the aftermath of Peru’s devastating civil war to do so.

Wolitzer perfectly captures her women's resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties.

Concerned mothers are talking about a new novel, The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

Her best novel to date... Writing with candour and humour, Wolitzer captures the neuroses of a rarefied mommy elite.

Wolitzer is wickedly, terrifically funny - a true delight

This might well make you see work in a new light

Smart and clever...Wolitzer could describe paint drying and make it funny, but there are hard questions posed in her portrait of these fortysomething urban females

A quite superb piece of work.

Sparky... modern... brilliant

[A] discomforting and acute tragicomedy ... The bleaker and darker his book becomes, the better it gets, building to a shocking and expertly executed conclusion. Tipped for the top on publication of his first novel, Lee here confirms his talent

For all painful events it covers, this is a joyful book. Lee educates us in the beautiful mess of humanity surrounding this tragic event. Joy is one of the best new novels this year.

A black comedy of exuberance and bite … original, and brilliantly executed; the characters’ voices … ventriloquised with flair … This is the wittiest, most addictive piece of literary yuppie-bashing since Martin Amis’s Money. Lee is a writer to keep an eye on.

A major new voice in British fiction.

A brilliant book... Jonathan Lee is one of those rare, agile writers who can take your breath away.

[Joy] displays a real flair for narrative and characterisation…Highly accomplished…The closest comparison that can be made is with Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which shares a similarly bravura command of narrative voice…Exquisitely and surprisingly written…it proves that Lee is a significant talent and that his future work should be well worth awaiting.

Lee’s writing is witty and engaging, containing something of the wearied disgust of Raymond Chandler’s prose…These four voices confiding in the counsellor are entertainingly distinct…The novel’s outstanding achievement, however, is the central, spiralling narrative that Jonathan Lee threads among these personal accounts: the intimate story of how Joy came to fall, a forensic portrayal of despair that shows Lee to be an exceptional, brave prose stylist. The dark revelations in the book’s final pages are disturbing while not gratuitous, but Lee also allows some credible room for optimism among these cluttered lives. Funny and humane, Joy is an enormously impressive piece of storytelling

Lee's the real deal - a British writer on the cusp of greatness. This novel follows the aftermath of lawyer Joy Stephen's apparent suicide. The corporate and personal explode in a brilliant powerful dissection of modern Britain.

Jonathan Lee’s second novel, Joy charts the final day in the life of a high-flying young lawyer. Lee writes with extraordinary vividness, with prose so sharply defined it takes your breath away.

With its supple prose, ingenious structure, wit and slow-burn sympathy, Joy is a sly miracle of a novel.

[One] of Britain’s most exciting writers… I loved how Jonathan Lee’s Joy gradually unravels through different characters…The ending of Joy is brilliantly shocking. I finished it three weeks ago and it’s still playing on my mind… Something about Joy’s slow and brooding story really affected me…Lee manages to make every voice distinct…It is Joy’s complexity which keeps you reading…[A] wonderful book.

Lee constructs office scenes easily, weaving together numerous characters and dialogues with flair…the writing crackles.