The novel has everything: an absorbing melodrama, with a supporting cast of heroes, villains and eccentrics, set in a London where vast wealth and desperate poverty live cheek-by-jow

Nicholas Nickleby was a revelation. Here was a school - Dotheboy's Hall, with its grotesque headmaster, Wackford Squeers - which was even worse than the prison camp to which my poor innocent parents had confined me! The story of Dotheboy's Hall seemed horribly familiar - the beatings, the bad food. But here was something to which even a child could respond. As well as being sympathetic to the plight of the children, the author was hilarious

Dickens is huge - like the sky. Pick any page of Dickens and it's immediately recognizable as him, yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror, or a psychological study of a murderer - or any combination of these

One of the best in this series, a nice mix of wit and wisecracks

Rome is vividly brought to life - alien yet curiously familiar. And the story gallops along at a tremendous pace with humour and suspense dispensed in equal measure. Saturnalia is another rollicking good yarn

Wit, excitement and surprises in ancient Rome

Another entertaining adventure

Falco wisecracks his way through the empire's sleazy underside . . . Davis' crimes are wickedly convoluted - real fun

At every turn, Udall plays with his readers' expectations of believers and non-believers, husbands and wives...That this longish book is kept largely aloft by a structure of humorous conceits is an indication of the author's strengths as a storyteller.

Irving writes with clarity and compassion about the Aids epidemic: his forensic detailing of this merciless disease is deeply affecting

Crammed with Irving's signature cleverness

This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic and funny - it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best

In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career Irving has always cherished our peculiarities - in a fierce, not a saccharine way. Now he has extended his sympathies - and ours - still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. John Irving in this magnificent novel - his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp - has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?

A quietly compelling and provocative work

A dark and sinewy novel, written with sparse clarity and affecting subtlety

In a year marked by epics, it's a relief to delve into this quiet, surprisingly tense debut novel - small enough to stuff in a stocking but packing a huge emotional punch

A novel of subtle beauty and quiet grace; I found myself hanging on every simple word, as tense about the consequences of a man finding an apartment as if I were reading about a man defusing a bomb. ... It is one of the best novels I have read in a long time. ... With elegant restraint, Baxter layers the narratives, anecdotes and experiences in the manner of life as continuous essay, the topic of which might be stated as, "What is a right way to be in the world?" ... It is very much to Baxter's credit that he presents this struggle as if it were thriller, love story, philosophical novel and dark comedy combined, in a novel not liek a bullet but like an arrow flying straight to the heart of the matter.

A quiet and powerful read through and through. Baxter's clean and direct prose generates its own momentum. He chooses not to create a tidy drama where characters are explained by their pasts. Rather, he creates something bigger and more true.

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