The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

And what does Solzhenitsyn say about cancer? How does he reach me, in Australia, with his Russian book? He shows me something valuable that I discovered during my own medical treatment. The people who are involved in cancer -- the sufferer, the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies -- are often occupied less with the cancer than with each other. There are small societies of patients and medical workers in a hospital ward, and in those societies people share what they have: their love and resentment, their stories and observations.

Solzhenitsyn was a great writer as the result of the collision of a particular personality and an awesome subject matter

Solzhenitsyn is a man of genius…it is a privilege to be Solzhenitsyn’s contemporary

There has been no such analysis of the corrupting power of the police state in Soviet literature

He is one of the towering figures of the age, as writer, as moralist, as hero

I love all of Dickens

Witty enough to make you laugh out loud, but there are moments of real emotion that keep the book from being too light

A superb ear for dialogue...wonderfully comic

Riotously high in laughs and glamour. I defy a festive grump not to be cheered by it

Fast-paced and funny

Influenced by magical realism and the cool prose of modernism, first-time author Chloe Aridjis takes the best from each