Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty...I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. But 100 years ago, Edith Wharton's drive, independence, wilfulness and autodidactic mastery of the English language were extraordinary, and I bashfully claim her as a kindred spirit

A cautionary tale of social disaster, told with wit and elan

Like Henry James, Wharton has a wonderful gift of revealing the inner life of her characters while also documenting the elegance and hypocrisy of high society...the accumulation of desolation in the final three chapters reduces me to tears

[Edith Wharton was] an ambitious, brilliant and industrious woman who created "her own personal and professional revolution"

Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines

The supreme novel of New York in its last great belle époque...Wharton is at her magnificent, merciless best here...The novel witheringly shows the savage side of high society, an impeccably mannered world of bridge and betrayal that simply spits Bart out

No one has bettered Edith Wharton on the cash-sex nexus of the respectable, as well as the clashes of propriety and fashion. The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth are probably the best novels by this knowing, compassionate writer

In a world of massive tragedy, it may seem strange to find the decline and death of Lily Bart, Edith Wharton's doomed protagonist in The House of Mirth, so sad...what makes one weep for Lily Bart in the end is the way her basic moral rectitude is so cruelly betrayed

With deceptively modest prose, Tóibín presents the Virgin Mary's story as one of human loss rather than salvation. By doing so he gives us a Mary to identify with rather than venerate.

Daring and very moving

The Testament of Mary, a novella of absences and silences, achieves a shimmering power

Tóibín's take on the most famous mother in history ... is all too believable

[Reveals] Vonnegut’s passions, annoyances, loves, losses, mind and heart . . . The letters stand alone—and stand tall, indeed. . . . Vonnegut’s most human of hearts beats on every page

A well-rounded collection of letters

[The letters] have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity… Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous

Crisply edited... There was something fundamentally goodhearted about Vonnegut. For all his gloom and cantankerousness, he never entirely lost his faith in human nature.