As hilarious as it is spot-on

O'Farrell is a consistently humorous writer with an acute ear for the absurdities of middle class pretension. It's hard to fault his satire on competitive parenting or his conclusions regarding social inequalities

O'Farrell is one of the best contemporary satirists in the business and he has middle class pushy mothers down to a tee in this latest toe-curling, hackle-rising chronicle of hyper-parenting... The one-liners are sublime and the comedic situations utterly hilarious. Don't miss this

O'Farrell has scored a bullseye with this satirical salvo... Taps into Middle England's neuroses with terrific wit

Elegant novel ... Franck's great strength is her ability to place her characters in unenviable situations yet retain the reader's sympathy

There is a relentless sense of purpose about the complex, ever-shifting narrative that continually tests the reader

Heart-rending

It is an admirable book and in its best passages is inspired and haunting

Generations of women survive, most movingly, in the wreckage left by total war

Beautifully constructed... Franck has a remarkable ability to capture the nuances of human behaviour,and her subtle depiction of Helene's growing coldness, or "blindness", and the wider blindness of a society heading for disaster, is utterly compelling

Read it and weep

With its intriguing plot and strong characterisation, Julia Franck's novel depicts beautifully both personal and historical tragedies, and gives us a compelling portrait of a remarkable woman in difficult times

A rich, affecting novel

Kennedy is attuned to the shock of separation, as well as the pain ... Kennedy is adept at different types of stories

A virtuoso of prose

A L Kennedy's short stories are rare pearls, all seductive surface and dark depths

What admirable richness and complexity

Kennedy has such control over her material that it never overwhelms the reader or becomes showily gothic

There's no denying that these utterly controlled stories have a power, humanity, and even beauty of their own

While What Becomes is not always an easy book to read, Kennedy's linguistic inventiveness, wild humour and compassion make it an unexpectedly joyful one

Twelve stories from the manic mistress of comically vitriolic observation

Savour this book

Kennedy specialises in acute observations of thought... In this collection of short stories, she inhabits unhappy couples, lonely shopkeepers and strangers in hotel rooms to searing, painful and comic effect

A virtuoso performance...This is a collection of stories that will be re-reading exceptionally well, like an album of brilliant songs you keep wanting to hear again

Funny and furious, Kennedy's tales of floundering marriages and domestic disappointment follow an anarchic path of their own

Kennedy's superlative work always attracts admiration