Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced

4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold.

4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail.

Banville does regretful roues better than almost anyone ... His use of language can also be startlingly brilliant ... Terrific ... full of sadness and yearning.

This dazzling novel captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire.

... ravishingly written and scrupulously observed

The Booker prize winning author - widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in English today - has produced what many already consider a literary masterpiece.

We now want them [novels] to provoke, cajole, edify, entertain, puzzle, divert, clarify and console. Banville's new novel does all these things and much more besides.

Banville, with his forensic sensory memory, his great gift for textural (and textual) precision, his ability to inhabit not just a room, as a writer, but also the full weight of a breathing body, is exactly in his element here.

A novel criss-crossed with ghost roads and dead-ends and peopled by shifty characters who seem provisional even to themselves. It is written in Baville's customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery, prose and deliberately slows you down and frequently wrongfoots you.

A bittersweet rumination on first love ... The language soars, full of the beauty of nature and the sadness of loss

Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion ... Banville is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it's a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured ... This is a luminous breathtaking work

Ancient Light also bears resemblance to Lolita that extend beyond the obvious hallmark ecstatic prose..different periods of his life blending into a single meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears.

A beautifully written tale of youthful passion

A novel about sexual awakening and the tricks that memory plays. Banville's lushly gorgeous prose enhances a mood of brooding passion in a place of secrets

A sumptuous novel. Read it for the sentences and smarts, and for the copious sexy parts

Everything I want from a love story: sexy, convincing, baffling, funny, sad and unforgettable

Banville's exquisitely written novel unravels the deceptions of memory with wit and pathos

Compelling ... captures the mood of the current moment and what seems to be a new "lost generation", one formed not so much by exposure to violence, as immunity to and alienation from it. Once upon a time, there was no place like home; in Mr. Baxter's world, home, it seems, is no place.

Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic ... With its disorienting juxtaposition of the absolutely ordinary and the strange and vaguely threatening, the novel evokes the work of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, while its oblique explorations of memory suggest a debt to W.G. Sebald

A thrilling follow-up to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island...Silver is a novel that will appeal to readers of all ages. Beautifully written and genuinely exciting...Best of all, Motion’s novel stays true to Stevenson’s original tale while adding an extra dimension.

Elegant, thrilling sequel...The plot is gripping, a mixture of high adventure, low cunning and desperation...Motion’s prose vivid and glowingly poetic, is a brilliant counterpoint to the fascinating action.

This is a pacey tale with an appropriately feisty young heroine for modern readers

Andrew Motion brings lyricism but, more importantly, rollicking adventure to this sequel to Treasure Island