Per Petterson is a profoundly gifted novelist

Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely.... Petterson has the ability to be simultaneously restrained and terribly tender...Extraordinary skill... There is a quality that I can only call charm, or something like charm, to Petterson's essentially dark and lonely sensibility.

Petterson applies candour, sensitivity and humour to his intimate studies of life as lived by us, the ordinary majority, and the result is singular magic...resoundingly human...All the inevitability of life, its fragile glue and the doubts that stalk the survivors are summoned and considered in Petterson's candid, allusive fiction. There is no easy sentiment, only genuine emotional power...Tender, masterfully evocative

Spare, cool, precise prose...a powerful evocation of the difficulty of communication within families

I Curse the River of Time is a work of blackest tragicomedy, a novel as cold and scintillating and desolate as the northern winter landscapes that are its setting.

Per Petterson stands unsurpassed among contemporary writers for existential truth telling

He unpacks the folly and pain of the human condition, leaving space for wit

My new literary heartthrob is the Norwegian writer Per Petterson...his latest book...returns to a favourite character, Arvid Jansen, and follows his struggles to resolve his relationship with his dying mother, whose disappointment in her son strips him bare.

Shows Petterson's alter ego, Arvid Jansen, confronting his mother's terminal cancer, and recreates his indigent, often alienated youth in East Oslo with charitable humour.

Playful, gripping and teasingly philosophical without ever being overwhelming, the book reimagines in plain yet often poetic prose many of the Odyssey's key stories, tantalising the reader with alternative outcomes, unexpected twists and haunting interludes

Taylor wears his research lightly but there is no doubt how much effort he has expended... The whole is an engaging drama - escapism of the highest standard

Taylor manages to successfully pastiche a 19th-century mystery novel with this fast paced, enjoyable read

This is a book to read by the fireside, to be swept along in, to realise - with a start - that hours have gone by...In other words, to rediscover the lost-in-another-world joy of reading. And this book really IS a joy...my favourite book of the year so far

A delicious, highly intelligent page-turner... With clever, confident plotting and meticulous period details, this is an engrossing and deeply satisfying read

As you would expect from somebody steeped in Victorian fictional history, Taylor rarely puts a foot wrong...the colourful events which take place on the Downs should delight any racing enthusiast

Taylor’s love and understanding of Victorian melodrama is put to good use in this tangibly detailed and deliciously written pastiche centred on an Epsom Derby swindle

This is a fictional world in which daughters are ready to bump off their fathers, husbands to exploit their wives, and everyone is happy to chance their assets on the wheel of fortune. It’s a novel that will keep you gripped until the very last furlong

It is a detective story as gripping as the Victorian novels that inspired it, and is written with narrative flair and a terrific sense of fun

Derby Day will be hard to put down... As ever with Taylor, literary complexities lurk under the smooth surface of a stylish page-turner

De Witt has intelligence, wit and unusual stylistic bravery

An ambitious, colossal debut novel

DeWitt pushes enjoyably but firmly against (and sometimes beyond) the unknown capabilities of the reader