Idiosyncratic, wilful, cute, a choppy blur of emotion and erudition, cocky, confrontational conversation and fragmented urban commentary, it starts off resembling something by Russell Hoban or Josephine Saxton - or even Janet Frame

Carmen Martin Gaite writes evocatively and gracefully, and has some intriguing things to say about story-telling, and about the prisons we create for ourselves

The Ex-Wives marries comedy and canniness into a novel that’s warm, tolerant, shrewd and exuberant

Cracking good dialogue, excellent jokes and laser sharp

Deborah Moggach is brilliant at capturing just the right voice for her characters

Top Pick! A tragic otherworldly tale of lovers, Katsu’s brilliant series second will utterly enchant you. The story is told in such a distinctive voice, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it. The characters will delight you, horrify you and instill hope, but all are created with many layers of humanity as they grown and change through the ages. It’s one of this reviewer’s favorites so far this year

Katsu’s seductive second book in her supernatural thriller trilogy picks up where her well-received debut, The Taker, left off... At times melodramatic and constrained by the limitations of a middle volume, this installment stays true to its author’s initial vision.

This sequel to The Taker continues the time-traveling tale of two immortals whose destinies are bound together by love, longing, misery, and fate ... Katsu’s beautiful, mesmerizing narrative will not lesson the effect of her very adult and often brutal dark fairy tale ... leaves readers anxiously awaiting Katsu’s final volume.

Adair’s complexity will be explored and expanded, Lanny’s adventures will thrill you, new characters will steal and break your heart (oh, Savva), old characters will boil your blood, and dark magic will snake up the bones of the story like the vines of a rogue bush. But my favourite part of this story, as always, is Alma Katsu’s haunting prose. I have never been so affected by the elegance and terror that fills her every word.

Alma Katsu has an incredible talent of storytelling. She put together a hauntingly beautiful tale of evil and romance. I can't stop thinking about this book. It is so wonderfully written and the story so captivating that I want to read it over and over again….The Reckoning is without a doubt one of the top books on my list of favorite reads of 2012. I don't know how the author did it but this second installment is even more breathtaking and mesmerizing.

The story’s secondary characters are as rich and vicious in personality as the main ones are and with engaging traits such as greed, pure evil, and traitorous. But the true hook in this story is the antagonist, Adair. Corrupt, evil, murderous, and as immortal as the heroine herself. Absolutely fascinating…Underlying themes explored in this novel of immortality are change, love, obsession, vengeance, power, life and death, and Alma Katsu weaves it all together in a fascinating paranormal yarn that grips you from start to finish…The drama is fascinating and thrilling. Definitely a unique, enduring story of the paranormal!

This series amazes me. It is haunting, evil, lovely and very romantic all at the same time. I seriously cannot stop thinking about these books.

What I liked about The Reckoning: Pretty much everything. Katsu’s writing falls nicely somewhere in between fancy literary writing and popular fiction.

5 out of 5 stars: I can’t wait to see how the series will end.

I was really grabbed by the narrative voice and I was fasincated by the story ... what a story!

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide

A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating

Provocative, funny and original

A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness

An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds

A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture

[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being

Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of

Playful, funny... absolutely true

Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations

Amusing and original