Hilton's premise strikes a deep chord in today's 'everything is relative' society. His utopia retains all its charm and, in his creation of Shangri-La, he added something permanently to the language

Lost Horizon introduced the world to a Tibetan paradise where people live extraordinarily long lives of peace, harmony and wisdom. Expertly plotted and deftly written, Hilton's book suggests mysteries without spelling them out - and leaves us wanting more

James Hilton invented the name Shangri-La for a paradise on earth in a book that captured the imagination of a public dealing with financial hardships and the threat of Nazism

More than 60 years after James Hilton wrote Lost Horizon, launching one of the century's most enduring literary mysteries, the search for paradise on earth has led to the mountains of south-west China… Hilton intended it as a pacifist parable; Hollywood turned it into a romantic blockbuster

The important thing to note about this very fine novel - the tale of an adventure in Tibet - is that it is unusual and the product of a first-class mind...a wildly exciting story, nightmare, fantasy, or what you will

A charm both of poetry and of strangeness... It is absorbing, a book one will re-read

Hilton (1900-1954) is part of the vast company of largely forgotten good authors... He produced a small handful of excellent popular novels - Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Random Harvest - but nothing more enduring than the one that gave us Shangri-La: Lost Horizon

The word [Shangri-La] has become part of the English language, the name of retirement bungalows from Devon to Durban; of hotels and boarding houses promising rest and seclusion in every continent

An ironic anti-novel about the novel: it poses serious questions about the form’s limitations in being able to capture the protean reality of memory and identity but also argues for its continuing relevance (taking its cue from writers like Barthes, Perec and Queneau who appear in its pages) as a post-modernist game of ideas, a thought-provoking jeu d’esprit.

I just loved it. Lethally funny and so clever.

I ADORED it. It's the most fun I've had with a book in a long time, and I love how she writes - so many dazzling sentences and phrases.

Sparkling savage and remarkably sexy.

A wickedly funny, biting satire of Notting Hill's basement-digging class. My absolute guiltiest read this summer.

The Jane Austen of W11

An addictively funny read about the lives of the rich and richer. Four stars

Smart, pacy, and hysterically funny

This provocative debut explores whether monogamy is all it’s cracked up to be

Witty, sparkling and a dissection of monogamy and happiness... Entertaining

Here is a heroine who scores a solid ten on the sass-o-meter, and she made the whole reading experience a hoot… Guilt-free fun with this deliciously rampant romp.