This is a book that will make you laugh and make you cry

Do believe the hype, buy into it, curl up with it, savour every sentence, then turn around and re-read

An impressive début, not only for its vitality and verve, but mainly for the sheer audacity of its scope and vision ... an epic tale ... swooping, funny ... it has ambition, wit and is unafraid

Announces the debut of a preternaturally gifted new writer ... street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time

Relentlessly funny ... idiosyncratic, and deeply felt

An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious ... I was delighted

She is . . . a George Eliot of multi-culturalism

[Zadie Smith] is one of the prominent voices of her generation

Britain's finest young author

[Zadie Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation

[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