The era and the seaside locale are beautifully rendered and observed, not least the social and sexual undercurrents of the time

A humane and evocative portrait of a time when lives were destroyed by intolerance

This spiky portrait of love makes for a gripping read

Pitch perfect

A moving story of longing and frustration

Stunning...fraught and honest

'I loved it. Devoured it! A wonderful read. Tense, romantic, smart; a beautiful portrait of a seaside town poised at an exact moment in history, with people trapped by laws and mores'

A powerful story of love, shame and jealousy

Roberts gives us two strong, absorbing voices, whose competing claims on our sympathies...make My Policeman a satisfyingly taut and involving read

A powerful story of forbidden love, regret, and living as your true self

A gripping read

A sensitive, sweeping novel

Captures the obsessive and destructive madness of sexual jealousy

Roberts deploys her research carefully, honing a novel with a strong period feel and a sprightly structure

An amazing read

Roberts’ sharp, evocative prose renders this simple story complex, enthralling and compelling

This spiky portrait of love makes for a gripping read

A heartbreaking examination of lives and love

A powerful story of sexual jealousy and longing, My Policeman is also a heartbreaking examination of lives and love that has gone to waste in an era in which homosexuality was a prosecutable offence

A beautiful and thoughtfully written novel

Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality.... channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac... Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment's primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence.

It's deftly crafted, packs an emotional punch, and Powers's urgent environmental message, delivered by the Greta Thunberg-like Robin, comes through loud and clear

Powers is extremely good at creating a very specific emotion in the reader: a potent mix of sadness and guilt. He's also a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds

Bewilderment is a compelling story about love in a dying world

Powers succeeds in engaging both head and heart. And through its central story of bereavement, this novel of parenting and the environment becomes a multifaceted exploration of mortality

It is a thoughtful exploration of individual grief, a study in empathy for the biosphere, a questioning of the medical profession's pathologising of children and a beginner's guide to eco-biology... Bewilderment is both cerebral and heartfelt, a rigorous and damning assessment of the state of the world today. A call to arms for empathy and action

Utterly absorbing

One of our most lavishly gifted writers

Nothing less than brilliant

It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book

With its first few pages, Powers' novel completely captivated us and with its last, it bowled us over. Powers creates a texture and specificity to our future that feels simultaneously sweepingly large and breathtakingly intimate, told through the most relatable point of view: the ferocious love of a parent for his child and his struggle to provide him a better tomorrow.

On The Overstory: It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.

On The Overstory: Really, just one of the best novels, period

On The Overstory: Monumental . . . breath-taking . . . a gigantic fable of genuine truths

On The Overstory: Exhilarating . . . on almost every page you will find sentences that combine precision and vision

On The Overstory: The best book I've read in ten years. A remarkable piece of literature

On The Overstory: An extraordinary novel . . . an astonishing performance . . . he is incredibly good at turning science into poetry

The success of the story - and a success it is - comes not from the ingenious scientific speculations, nor the shrewd literary connections (on the "emotional telepathy" of a work of art, or Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon), but the human story between father and son, as Theo finds out 'how my brain learns to resemble what it loves

Richard Powers's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is both brutal and heartwarming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, quietly building to an inevitable and devastating close

He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent

In Bewilderment, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist has crafted a story of great beauty and power