Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America

One of the great existentialist novels, worthy to stand alongside the efforts of Sartre and Camus

Marks the true possibility of encounter between the Latin–American imagination and the contemporary world

Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed

I'm permanently indebted to the work of Cortázar

He was, perhaps without trying, the Argentine who made the whole world love him

Here is literary cunning and accomplishment of a high order

The dialogue is brilliant, whether the subject is literature, love, Mondrian, jazz or the fallibility of science

Mr Cortazar has marked off a corner of the world singularly his own

The Illness Lesson truly shook me. In prose so sharp it cuts through the decades and arrives at the present day, Clare Beams takes a shocking moment out of true history, and brings it to life. You want to know how horrifying things happened while decent people looked on and did nothing? Read this novel. I believed every nuance of these characters’ thoughts, the conflicts waging war inside their own minds, their devastation, and their courage. I was immensely moved by this story, and the people who populate its pages.

Clare Beams’ writing has a hypnotic quality. Her images are rendered with inventive, piercing clarity (apples knocking together like knees!), yet she is also doing something quite special with rhythm and pacing, creating a subtle soundscape that completely envelops you in the narrative. Reading The Illness Lesson I experienced the exquisite sense of vertigo that is only ever sparked by a writer who’s so in control of her story . . . That bond of trust did not disappoint: The Illness Lesson shines with generosity and rage, and I was both chilled to the bone by it, and felt comforted and held.

Stunningly good—a brainy page-turner that’s gorgeous and frightening in equal measure. The Illness Lesson dazzled me.

Narrated from a painfully intimate perspective, The Illness Lesson explores the consequences of an outrageous medical treatment inflicted upon adolescent girls in 1870’s New England to cure “hysteria”. In Clare Beams’ luminous and suspenseful prose, the unspeakable is spoken, falteringly at first, then with triumphant strength. Its timeliness will be evident to readers for whom the suppression of female sexuality / identity is an ongoing and urgent issue.

Beams excels in her depiction of Caroline, an intriguingly complex character, and in her depiction of the school, which allows the reader a clear view of changing gender roles in the period, with parallels to today’s sexual abuse scandals. This powerful and resonant feminist story will move readers

This suspenseful and vividly evocative tale expertly explores women’s oppression as well as their sexuality through the eyes of a heroine who is sometimes maddening, at other times sympathetic, and always wholly compelling and beautifully rendered

Don’t be put off thinking this is a sci-fi book – it’s so much more than that. Utterly brilliant.

One of the best thrillers I’ve read in a long time, an incredible story about an astronaut marooned on Mars. This is no science fiction tale: the technology is beautifully researched and based on what is currently envisioned for a manned flight to Mars. It feels so real it could almost be nonfiction, and yet it has the narrative drive and power of a rocket launch. This is Apollo 13 times ten. I could not put this book down.

Gripping…shapes up like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as written by someone brighter.

The tension simply never lets up, from the first page to the last, and at no point does the believability falter for even a second. You can't shake the feeling that this could all really happen.

Weir has fashioned in Mark Watney one of the most appealing, funny and resourceful characters in recent fiction ... gripping

one of the best survival stories you’ll ever read (think Robinson Crusoe on Mars only more extreme).

Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.

Apollo 13-meets-Robinson-Crusoe-on-Mars, and I guess for those who enjoyed the films Gravity or Moon, this one will be a literary equivalent ... I was, in the end, totally won over by this book in its celebration of how humans can deal with anything the harshness of science and extreme environments can pose, and it kept me reading longer than I meant to

one of the most thrilling and absorbing novels I have ever read

Riveting...a tightly constructed and completely believable story of a man's ingenuity and strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Weir combines the heart-stopping with the humorous in this brilliant debut novel... the perfect mix of action and space adventure.

An exciting, insightful science- based tale [that] kept me turning the pages to see what ingenious solution our hero would concoct to survive yet anotherimpossible dilemma

A potent brew of fame, sexual power, hypocrisy and bad men.

A powerful novel.

Actress is a fabric of musings… The characters in Enright’s novels are absorbing because they seem recognisable in an unassuming way: they’re as lovely, boring and complex as the people outside the books.

Enright, herself a former actress, captures all the comedy and pathos that comes from living the strange, unreal life of an actor.

A raw, tender portrayal of a woman undone by her work, and the men who control it. Seamlessly wrought, it is quite bewitching.

Actress is a poignant tale of the vicissitudes of fame and its effects on the loved ones of the famous.

Compelling.

The next stage in an illustrious writing career… stuffed full of dark wit, memorable lines and striking images.

Enright is to Dublin as Didion is to California.

I've just started reading Anne Enright's Actress. I very much enjoyed her previous novel, The Green Road. This one has glorious lines even in the opening pages.

I would definitely recommend Actress by Anne Enright, it is her at her very best.

Few reviews said how absolutely hilarious [Actress] is. Enright skewers beautifully those creepy provincial aesthetes of Dublin of the sixties and seventies.

Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness. Here she conjures [a] rollicking story.

A rich, impressively imagined work about a stage and screen star who may never have existed but seems considerably more human than many real-life figures as seen through their own eyes or those of any but the finest biographers.

This story is about mothers and daughters, but also secrets in families and women in Ireland. It's an easy read, with a quintessentially Irish tone... It's brilliant.

Anne Enright's brilliant novel is a darkly glittering account of the cost to both the mother and her daughter of Katherine's complicated fame.

A gem from a former Booker winner.

Anne Enright['s]...writing is simply glorious. Comedy and tragedy in one.