A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well

O'Hara occupies a unique position...He is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust

O'Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character

A fascinating character study by one of America's most underrated storytellers, but there are other rewards as well. O'Hara's dialogue is unerringly authentic and his narrative passages as graphic as a photograph

His ear for dialogue is legendary, and he evoked New York cabbies, Hollywood producers and cheap hoods like Pal Joey as easily as he did Park Avenue socialites... Few authors today write convincingly of matters involving public life and private morality - they tend to do one or the other. But O'Hara could intertwine them in a five-page sketch or an 800-page epic.

Invaluable because of his wisdom and the passionate nature of his engagement

Oz’s cool, measured prose accumulates into a sense of uncertainty in a collection whose portentous ambience is resonant of the unnerving, fabular fiction of Magnus Mills or Haruki Murakami

Excellent

Invaluable because of his wisdom and the passionate nature of his engagement and his sane effort to find the outlines of an agreement in the Middle East

This brief but resonant book collects the novelist Amos Oz's lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... Sometimes he is so careful not to say anything that would offend either side that he ends up saying very little at all. But perhaps it is that very tact, that respect for the other, that constitutes his most eloquent response to the fanatic

A riveting reconstruction of a crucial era in Russian history… shows iconic figures of the period as real people

Covering the twenty years that turned Catherine the Great from a young bride on approval to the legendary Empress of Russia, Eva Stachniak's novel gives a magical insight into the hopes and fears that haunted the corridors of the St Petersburg palace. It brings alive the very tastes and textures of the mid-eighteenth century

An intimate portrait of 18th century girl-power

A wry moral tale exploring the little evasions and compromises of everyday life. Translator Agnes Scott does justice to Solstad’s measured voice

This short-but-striking novel quickly reveals itself to be…crime fiction, yes, but also a subtle and deeply introspective consideration of the inertia of lonely middle-age, its philosophy existentialist in the manner of Jean Paul Sartre, Ingmar Bergman and certain novels of Georges Simenon. The result is a highly complex and accomplished work

Intriguing tale… Solstad expertly navigates the bizarre mind of a clever but lonely man locked in an existentialist nightmare

This is no straightforward crime novel…an exploration of guilt, inaction and moral quandaries