Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read. Barnes is like a worldly, secular reincarnation of a medieval gloss-writer on sacred texts, and what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we think about what we think we know

There is more moral and intellectual fodder, and more jokes, here than you will read in a month of Sundays...storytelling and teaching which captivate, liberate, and above all, enchant

You will want to read it again and again, and why not? - there's nothing around to touch it

This is a novel like no other - provocative, superbly funny, a wonderful and most original work...gives the reader a sense of ebullient, whooping joy

Barnes has created something unique in his work: a particular way of looking at life, at words, at relationships

Fantastically mind-boggling

Tissues are essential. You'll ricochet between delicately watering eyes at the romance of it all and howling sobs at the unbearable tenderness

It would be a hard heart indeed that remained unmoved . . . the tender feelings that Noble engenders in her readers are to be cherished

So fluid, the pages turn themselves

Irresistible comfort read

Noble is the mistress of the tearjerking message of love

Ludo is a fascinatingly flawed narrator, and the language is alive with livid, unsettling imagery

James Scudamore again achieves something magical

Slinkily assured... a steamlined fantasy summons up a teeming citadel where the wealthy take to their helicopters "like fat flies", leaving migrant workers to swarm below

There is so much... brilliantly at work in James Scudamore's Heliopolis that it seems arbitrary to praise one element over another

Sinister, shocking and extremely powerful

Wonderful

Her writing is always thrilling and this is much more than simply a page-turner

A successful novel, well made and written with a light touch

It is beautifully written, and elegantly edited, and manages to pack in vivid characterisations built on tragic family histories... With its strong structure and interesting themes, it could be a textbook example of how to write a modern novel

Satisfying death-blow to place-in-the-sun escapism

A compelling novel

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

Creepily affecting

Chilling and vivid

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

Intriguing

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller