Visceral, passionate, sylvan...anti-hypocrisy, anti-repression..dealing with love, death, with young people with everything before them, dealt a cruelly stacked hand... Hardy reaches deeper, into our wildest recesses. In a safe world, he speaks to our animal side.

To no tragic novelist do we surrender more completely at the last...one of the most compassionate of all writers...you feel a kind of agony of helpless tenderness in the writer for all troubled souls

Hardy may have been born in 1840 shortly after Victoria came to the throne, but he speaks to the 20th century rather than the 19th.

A classic outsider novel. An anthem to misery.

Warm Bodies is a terrific book - a compelling literary fantasy which is also a strange and affecting pop-culture parable

Sweet and darkly witty, and, in R, offers a laconically charming hero... Set against the backdrop of this grim world, the life-and-death-changing love affair that develops is wryly playful, cinematic and ultimately moving - through the lost lives of the dead we are able relish life in all its messy, dishevelled gory glory

Has there been a more sympathetic monster since Frankenstein's?

Enormous fun

So sexy it makes Twilight look anaemic

A starry-eyed, sweetly comic story about the humanising power of love, for this is Romeo and Juliet...with zombies

Wonderfully original

One of the most imaginative love stories we've read in years - we absolutely loved it!

The problems of Isaac Marion's star-crossed lovers make the Montague-Capulet relationship seem easy. When your new suitor ate your old boyfriend's brain, trust issues are unavoidable... Has there been a more sympathetic monster since Frankenstein's?

Elegantly written, funny, self-aware

Beautifully written and wonderfully evocative

You'll love this book… A haunting love story that brings hope humanity can survive just about anything – even death

This superb novel goes by in a heartbeat, so smooth and engrossing is David Malouf's prose...It is a touching tale, full of pain, but rendered beautifully by Malouf's humanity

An audacious reworking of Homer's Iliad.

David Malouf...has given Homer's epic fresh life in this haunting mood piece...a graceful, eloquent text dominated by rage and sorrow

This novel explores the timeless motifs of epic, in miniature

You know it ends in death, and so do Malouf's haunted protagonists, but this telling, at once unfussy and wonderfully poetic, breathes warm life into a great epic

Breathtaking skill...an extraordinary emotional charge.

A finely honed, writerly and wise revisiting of one of the most famous episodes in The Iliad, when Priam the King of Troy goes to bring home the body of his dead son Hector. No-one in prose has managed to better Malouf's imaginative recreation of the Homeric world.

a potent new yarn... Beautifully written in simple language freighted with meaning, Ransom explores a king's impulse to act as a mourning father.