Anita Desai's lyrical yet pointed prose powerfully draws the portrait of a woman who can never blossom into her own in such an arid social landscape.

Casts a gleefully amoral eye at the world around him... You couldn't, as the man says, make it up

Comically rueful and tragically bloodshot

An immensely skilful writer. He has a sober, searching intelligence and he examines Hollywood and the prairie states with an unflinching candour and a rare strain of melancholy

Like a noxious Douglas Coupland, Palahniuk charts new-felt and totally contemporary categories of despair

Dizzying . . . subtle and profound . . . And The Land Lay Still reads like an alternative history of Scotland told by its everyday people instead of its movers and shakers . . . eminently readable

Both epic and domestic, it delivers a wonderful lifelikeness

A hugely ambitious and compassionate novel . . . a jam-packed, dizzying piece of fiction . . . already it's being spoken of as the most important novel about Scotland since Lanark