I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once

If you’re coming to Lurie for the first time, you must begin with the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs

Lurie...has quietly but surely established herself as one of this country's most able and witty novelists

Perhaps more shocking than she knows - shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet

In Foreign Affairs no detail lacks its special piquancy. And none can be savored without leaving you with a mouthful of barbed hooks

She has a capacity in her novels for noting the little vanities and foibles, the revealing mannerisms and contradictions in human social behaviour, which often reminds one of Austen

If you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them

An ingenious, touching book

A flawless jewel

Foreign Affairs is probably Alison Lurie’s best novel to date, certainly it is a triumph, and much of its success stems from its accomplished plotting. Lurie has known from the first how to tell a story brilliantly through the consciousness of a woman who in type and circumstance resembles the author herself

The first chapter is one of the most captivating in any recent novel I have read

Lurie weaves a characteristically sharp-eyed, deftly ironic comedy of cultural collisions and collusions that rightly won her comparisons to Henry James and Edith Wharton

I am convinced that Alison Lurie's fiction will long outlast that of many currently more fashionable names. There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy over the years. Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton

A brilliant novel - her best I think. The book is a triumph, and not simply of style...Foreign Affairs is witty, acerbic, and sometimes fiendishly clever

Warm, clever and funny

A powerful, wholly unsentimental novel about family love, loss, belonging and belief that is more focused but just as daring as its predecessor, and to my mind even more successful

Gyasi's second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is a very different book, and, I think, a better one - contemporary, personal, acutely focused on a single family, and intensely felt

Exquisitely written with a lightness of touch despite its difficult themes; this novel is a triumph

Raw, powerful storytelling that tackles race, religion, addiction and grief in a thoughtful way

With deft agility and undeniable artistry, Gyasi's latest is an eloquent examination of resilient survival

The Ghanaian-American has become a firm literary favour...Transcendent Kingdom is sure to cement her spot further

Meticulous, psychologically complex ... At once a vivid evocation of the immigrant experience and a sharp delineation of an individual's inner struggle, the novel brilliantly succeeds on both counts

Transcendent Kingdom is quiet in the way a wise soul will sit in the corner, clear their throat and when they speak, everyone listens...Transcendent Kingdom is a book always asking this question: how did we get here?

The range Gyasi displays in just two books is staggering

Remarkable, a devastating account of America . . . explores horror without ever losing sight of humanity or hope

A stirringly gifted writer. It's impossible not to admire the ambition and scope of Homegoing

If you want to know why the world is this way, try this book for starters

I need a book like this to remember what is possible

Beautifully written . . . a raw look at the personal destruction caused by the opioid crisis

A poignant story of family love, loss and ambition

Yaa Gyasi's writing is shining even as the tangled traumas of the past come to the surface

'Yaa's depiction of these illnesses; substance addiction and depression and the family's deep-rooted tangled traumas, is skilful . . . Transcendent Kingdom is a story of love, loss and redemption, and holds a mirror up to one version of the first-generation immigrant experience that will sadly seem familiar to many of us

Every one of her books makes you question the order of things... She is one of the greatest writers of the past century

Margaret Atwood has just done her own thing and now she is one of those authors who is helping to change the culture. I love her for her politics. When The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, it just seemed that that kind of theocracy and patriarchy she was depicting couldn't happen, the world was progressing, but look where we are

A hopeful tale. It reassures us that we are right to fear our enemies and right to resist them, and that totalitarianism can be seen off... The heroines in The Testaments are marvellously resourceful... It is massively satisfying to find this kind of heightened reality in fiction

Ingenuity has always delighted Atwood. Here she revels in it... The twists and turns of an extravagantly suspenseful final race for freedom are done with bravura relish

The Testaments take us to a subtly altered Gilead and, in many ways, a more hopeful one... a rallying cry for activism that argues for the connectedness of societies and their peoples... Atwood's task in returning to the world of her best-known work was a big one, but the result is a success

Atwood's voice has become a rallying cry against climate change and threats to equality

Atwood cracks open the claustrophobic world of Gilead and lets in some much-needed light and hope. Spare, tense and exciting

It’s a very different novel from The Handmaid’s Tale, charged with the optimism of change rather than drenched in nightmarish sweat... terrific

Taut and gratifying… At the heart of the novel is a consideration of the power of narrative itself – of who gets to speak and listen, of the ability for information to limit, control or expand a person’s world… ultimately the truth retains the power to destroy

It delivers superbly. The Testaments is, first and foremost, a manual of resistance . . . providing its readers first with a road map and secondly with hope

Gripping and full of incident, a deft balance of horror and wit… As ever, Atwood cuts to the truth about women and power

The oppressed feminist shriek of the first novel gets its more optimistic echo in The Testaments...has the dramatic thrust and power to scorch the memory

It is a measure of Atwood's virtuosity as a writer... that rather than picking up where she left off in 1985 when The Handmaid's Tale was published, she has written such a perfect companion piece

Like all good dystopian writers, she presents us with a cracked mirror in which we are asked
to see distorted images of ourselves

If The Handmaid's Tale is disturbing, The Testaments is, in many ways, even more so. Less violent, sure, but Gilead isn't fresh and new at this point. It is a society that has existed for well over a decade, and as such it has become normality for all those who live there...this is, perhaps, far more frightening than the punishments and cruelty we see in the original text

After Donald Trump's election, Ms Atwood came to be seen by some as a soothsayer... If The Handmaid's Tale was a warning, The Testaments has a more positive message... Ms Atwood says that it reflects a sense of hopefulness on her part

For those waiting to find out what happened next, The Testaments is a fantastic conclusion to the story

The transgressive, deliciously dangerous mind of Margaret Atwood

Compelling, poignant and controlled, Atwood's latest work will have any reader gripped

The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments can seem like dark tales for dark times. But Atwood argues that they are not. "Writing is always an act of hope,” she says, “because it assumes a reader. It assumes a reader in the future"... If what we need right now is a great big bundle of hope – and we do – I for one feel extremely reassured that Margaret Atwood is on hand to provide it.

Beautiful in its depth... It is in some ways the continuation and in some sense a response to the extraordinarily powerful world of Gilead she created in The Handmaid's Tale 30-odd years ago. There is a need now to look at what complicity, resilience and resistance might look like

Atwood mania is entirely merited. Not only is there no greater living writer, "Peggy Nature" as friends refer to her eco-activism, is our beloved sage. Her novels have engaged with myth, identity, the sisterhood, and our apocalyptic ecological crisis. Yet nothing has taken flight like her patriarchal dystopia, and nowhere more so than among women

She's always before her time. Each novel is about something people become incredibly interested in half an hour later... There is this tradition of women's writing that uses irony and lightness of touch to deliver monstrous concepts and beliefs. It's that ironic voice that has helped her seamlessly move from one generation of reader to the next. That is the test of a great writer

A savage and beautiful novel, and it speaks to us today, all around the world, with particular conviction and power

The Testaments has come at the right moment for her as well as us because she's now a real sage

A feast

A truly dazzling literary feat that – blessed be the fruit – entirely lives up to the hope and the hype… Atwood’s particular genius is pushing and pushing at sexist tropes until they reach their grotesque but ultimately logical conclusion

The Testaments calls for thought and reflection… ideological commitment is not its only characteristic. It is also a thriller, with a fast-paced plot featuring many entangled concealments and dramatic confrontations… Atwood’s writing is at its incisive best... Atwood is not simply responding to our current anxieties… it is also her own testament, and a renewal of the warning of The Handmaid’s Tale

The Testaments is all the better for choosing other, quieter forms of resistance for women under Gilead’s rule… The sequel is able to buoy you as a reader in a way The Handmaid’s Tale had no interest in doing, but sit with it and it’s still slippery and at times satisfyingly unsatisfying. This is an intriguing book from a woman who knows she can do bleak any day of the week

The Testaments combines gripping entertainment with a complex sense of humanity

Lydia's fascinating tale serves almost as a prequel, while the girls' stirring battle is peppered with pithy wit. Praise be

Atwood has conjured a compelling sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale that is tautly plotted in spare, economical prose… In The Testaments, Atwood succeeds in regaining control of Gilead through words

Terrifying, rage-inducing and utterly gripping

The interaction between these three women is deftly drawn. The enemy never feels other than overwhelmingly malign, yet perversely human and fallible

The Testaments cements Aunt Lydia as one of the most fascinatingly monstrous anti-heroes in fiction

‘Reminds us of the vital connection between words and power and how important it is to validate women’s words in particular

But the biggest name, with the year’s biggest book, is Margaret Atwood: her Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments

The biggest publishing event of the year

For my money, the single most exciting publishing event of the year

One of the most eagerly awaited books of the year

One of the year’s big novels will undoubtedly be Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments

It will be one of the literary events of the year

We'll be poring over The Handmaid's Tale for the 100th time in readiness

The hoopla around the launch of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is more reminiscent of the unveiling of an iPhone or something Pokemon related than that of a mere book

Tuesday was not merely Tuesday but Testaments Day, and the Capital Testaments Town

Last week's release of Atwood's sequel, The Testaments, made the last Harry Potter launch look like a wet November afternoon...a truly dazzling literary feat that -- blessed be the fruit -- entirely lives up to the hope and the hype... Atwood's particular genius is pushing and pushing at sexist tropes until they reach their grotesque but ultimately logical conclusion

Taylor Swift would kill for this kind of drama... Now, to read it

Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating

Terrifying and exhilarating

Atwood’s musings on power and the patterns of history [is] as incisive as ever

Undeniably page-turning stuff

A publishing sensation

The perfect escapist pleasure

Page-turning stuff

Canada's visionary

A delicious page-turner

A gripping novel with a satisfying conclusion

The Testamnets is a cracking sequel to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and a timely warning about the lengths to which a patriarchal culture will go to control female sexuality

A superb and suspenseful expose of misogyny and the moral ambiguity at the heart of a fanatical regime

[A] rare combination of a rollicking thriller with major political nous told one of our greatest living writers. Essential

An era-defining masterpiece

The Testaments… lived up to the hype

Superbly written and masterfully constructs the regime of Gilead more than its predecessor was able to

The extraordinary Margaret Atwood... she's fabulous'

[A] compelling story

Atwood's sequel shines with all the acuity and brilliance of the original, whilst continuing the story with flair and modern insight

There is no language I could use to express the emotion and beauty behind Margaret Atwood's words. Her work takes you on a journey of emotion - whether you are ready to fight, be kind, be vulnerable, stay strong or simply be, she takes you there

Thrilling, a meditation on courage which asks us to consider what our own response might be were we forced to choose between meek complicity and rebellion at risk of death

She's taken our times and made us wise to them

Inspiring and deeply disturbing