John Meade Falkner's tale of smuggling, a cursed diamond, revenge, ghosts, a secret code, wrongful imprisonment and great sacrifice. It calls for comparison with The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes. A novel of claustrophobic darkness, storm-wracked seas and wild romantic landscapes, it sweeps the reader irresistibly along, like the deadly undertow at Moonfleet Beach

A ripping yarn...a wonderful story of smuggling and skulduggery

This one of the great adventure stories for young people, perhaps even more enjoyable than Treasure Island

It's a Victorian adventure story about the 18th century; about an orphan boy who becomes involved with smugglers and with one particular mentor figure - the grim old Elzevir Block. It is beautifully written and astonishingly vivid: you live alongside the boy trapped in a tomb, escaping along a cliff track, let down a deep well by a villain to find a lost diamond, fleeing to the Hague, being duped, arrested, put in a prison camp for years, transported to Java, shipwrecked at last on his own home beach

A tale of smuggling and diamonds and winter storms, all set around a fictional village on the edge of Chesil Beach. In Faulkner's book, as in Ian McEwan's, the beach takes on a character of its own and the final scene, with its fearsome storm and its smugglers and crashing timbers, is as much about the beach as the characters.

It was the first book that ever gripped me. It's a bit like Treasure Island, but even better - with smugglers and hidden treasure and totally believable characters. I can still picture a very scary scene with coffins floating around a flooded crypt.

[An] extraordinary, unusually philosophical and human novel... Moore's prose is precise, never laboured and always, and this is the crucial point, convincing

Skilfully structured...delicate, involving novel

Moore deftly weaves together the present...and the past, evoking memory and grief in pitch-perfect detail

A very moving study of memory and grief

Lisa Moore's style is cool, clear, lethally accurate and reminiscent of Raymond Carver

Lisa Moore offers a devastating study of loneliness that is moving but never sentimental

A well-crafted and shrewd meditation on motherhood and loss.

A tragedy at sea, a miracle on paper... Moore offers us, elegantly, exultantly, the very consciousness of her characters. In this way, she does more than make us feel for them. She makes us feel what they feel, which is the point of literature and maybe even the point of being human.

This mesmerising book is full of tears, and is a graceful meditation on how to survive life's losses

Fans of Anita Shreve and Anne Enright will love this

The gentle, meandering pace of this exquisitely expresses the agony of grief and the confusions and complexities of parental love

Moore's portrayal of loss is remarkably real

Profoundly moving, beautifully written book

A marvellous book

A perfectly pitched novel that captures its characters and their dilemmas.

Lose yourself in a fantastical gastronomical journey ... This novel explores familial love in an unexpected way, and you'll be hooked from the first taste

This emotional and moving tale blew us away with its beauty

It's as beautiful as it is strange. Bender writes such lyrical sentences, you pause over them in wonder. She has an unusual take on life; and makes even the ordinary extraordinary. It's a compulsive page turner. This book is already a best seller in America, and has been embraced by book clubs. I loved it. It's one of those books you don't want to finish - and even when you have - it stays in your mind. Bender has written three previous novels. I intend to savour them all

This novel, in the style of stories like Chocolat, is a dreamy feast of gorgeous writing ... Gently, beautiful, odd, this is a story to sip and savour

An intriguing premise for an original novel about a family and its relationships

Moving and highly original, this book will make you look at food in a whole new light