Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving

Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental... Very beautiful and subtle... I feel more alive when I read her

Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur

Sumptuous

A perfectionist in her every word

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human . . . Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist—these are the qualities of the artist and the woman. It is time to rediscover them

She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully – greedily alive to every sensation and experience

A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Vintage has republished this classic from Colette that was first published in 1920 and it still sparkles and teases

A brilliantly observed tale of class and hedonism

Meg Wolitzer’s latest offering promises to be the epic novel of the summer

A wonderful novel, written with warmth and depth of emotion

This is an exhilarating, aerobatic, addictive novel

Meg Wolitzer’s best novel yet

The dreamy, criss-crossing narrative proves Wolitzer one of America’s most ingenious and important writers

An engrossing look at life’s twists and turns

The wit, intelligence and deep feeling of Wolitzer’s writing are extraordinary and The Interestings brings her achievement, already so steadfast and remarkable, to an even higher level.

This is a wonderful book. Intelligent and subtle, it is exquisitely written with enormous warmth and depth of emotion… Wolitzer is an affectionate and clear-sighted observer of human nature

Meg Wolitzer proves brilliant at writing normal, unremarkable lives, investing them with just as much detailed attention and humane humour as the lives of the beautiful, the rich and the famous… [She] also pulls off an impressive balancing act, sometimes inhabiting the moment-to-moment present of her characters, and at others times writing with a droll hindsight

There are certain authors whose new book you look forward to as though you were about to catch up on news from an old friend. And there are authors whose new book you fall on greedily because you know it will be tartly delicious and satisfy a hunger you didn’t know you had till you read them for the first time. For me, Meg Wolitzer has long been in both of those categories… The Interestings is full of Wolitzer’s trademark pleasures. I love her fearlessness in tackling everything … She has a sly wit and verbal brio which can even make clinical depression entertaining