An epic tale of human folly and endeavour, beautifully told and researched

Matthew Parker has picked a fascinating subject and written a book worthy of it ... It is peopled with a host of characters, some heroic, others corrupt, almost all out of the ordinary. There isn't a dull page

Parker's epic story, from the 18th century to the present day, is awesome

Parker has written the Panama story for a new generation. He quotes extensively from letters and diaries of ordinary workers writing home to their families. And it is their heartfelt views on the conditions in which they lived and worked that really bring this book to life

Parker's great forte in Panama Fever is to bring this complex story to life through a succession of vivid characters

Parker guides readers through the complicated story with a sure sense of both the larger narrative and the telling detail

Excellent... the story is an epic one, and Parker has brilliantly done justice to every aspect of a complex episode

The essence of Parker's rather remarkable achievement in this altogether entertaining history is to show just how much more than an engineering triumph the construction of the canal really was... This is exemplary history, vigorously told with a respect for complexity that enriches rather than obscures the pleasure of a great story

The extraordinary story of western man's compulsion to wrestle with nature in the central American swamps and rainforests

Matthew Parker intertwines the various strands of the story - personal and national, political and financial, geographical and technological - with finesse ... Best of all, his prose somehow manages to infect the reader with the Panama fever itself. It is no mean achievement

Today other armies of impoverished workmen build Dubai, Shanghai or the Three Gorges Dam with barely a murmur of the real price paid by them and by nature. It is a shame. We need writers capable of depicting these epic projects with the same skill Parker brings to portraying the 19th century's great engineering dream

A compelling novel of passions and secrets, politics and lies, love and betrayal, savagery and survival

Sweeping historical epic about a daring young woman forced to make a hard choice in Stalinist Russia

Excellent... the historical detail is strong. The characterisation is superb, with Sashenka being especially well drawn. With her unwanted beauty and charisma, her gentle nobility that transcends class or wealth and her earnest ideals which eventually cost her so much. Sashenka commands out total sympathy, and when she is forced apart from her children, the sadness is profound and hard to dispel. A powerful novel... with a heroine who lingers in the mind when the story is finished

Sashenka is grand in scale, rich in historical research, and yet never loses the flow of an addictive, racy, well-wrought plot. It combines a moving, satisfyingly just-neat-enough finale with a warning - that history has an awful habit of repeating itself

An epic novel... The suspense lasts until the final pages. There is no let-up. At the end of the book, you really feel that even though Sashenka is a fictional character, she has become one of the thousands of real people who haunt the Moscow archives that Montefiore knows so well