Energetic, racy, rude and lyrical...buy this translation and spend a damn good season in hell

A tour de force, alive, immediate, energetic and very moving

Excellent. Dante's vision vibrates again in all its original colour.The effect is dazzling

Michael Ondaatje's impressive new novel, containing dreams and fantasy between a ship's flanks...is, in the most etymological way, a wonderful novel: one full of wonders

Atmospheric, elegiac and at times, like Ondaatje's most famous novel, The English Patient, unbearably poignant

I love this book: the boys running wild on the long sea voyage, the slow revelation of the adult world they don't fully understand, the loss of the past and the beginning of the future, and even a sort of thriller in there! And the beauty of the sentences. Perfection

Wondrous

Part memoir, complete masterpiece... Written with tenderness, wisdom and sharp emotional recall, this is an exuberant elegy to innocence

Grave and playful at the same time, beautifully written and moving

It's impossible to explain through any discussion of plot and character the hypnotic brilliance of The Cat's Table. The joy of boyhood and the darkness at its edges are conveyed in sense of extraordinary imagination... It is entirely...well, Ondaatje-esque

Vividly follows the passage from Ceylon to England of an 10 year-old boy on a line full of eccentric, mysterious passengers

Ondaatje's prose, flawless as ever, deals with loneliness, friendship and pre-pubescent love

Translators give their wits and craft selflessly in service of others' work; this is a triumph of fidelity and unpretentiousness.

Tom McCarthy's C... a novel blazing with energy and, for all its postmodern ambitions, a rich, old-fashioned yarn

I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy's C also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize.

McCarthy's high-voltage writing runs through the reader like a charge.

New readers could grasp just how boldly he has tried to balance sumptuous period-fiction prose with a mischievous desire to sabotage his chosen form.

An exciting, revealing and touching story

The novel's interest (or lack thereof) lies mainly in its stubborn refusal of anything resembling a narrative payoff...I loved it, right down to the prose, which, unspooling in a vaguely menacing present-continuous, sounds like screenplay instructions to a set designer

A dazzlingly agile novel about the interconnectedness of things

Entertaining as well as ambitious

McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity