One of a number of cult writers to have emerged from post-communist central Europe... Stasiuk's prose has the easy flow of Kerouac's

Politicises the everyday so compellingly that it calls to mind the greatest work of John McGahern

A blistering existential thriller of dodgy deals and foresaken ideals

Harnessing the shape-shifting, paranoid ambience of Kafka, not as a means to pass comment on totalitarianism but on the void (political and social) created in its wake ... impressive for the quality of its prose (Stasiuk is fantastic at listless, urban desolation)...a rewarding despatch from a country undergoing enormous change

Paints a vivid and disturbing picture of contemporary life in Poland...offers a sobering vision of the new face of central Europe in a narrative that is at once hallucinatory, haunting and abject

A brilliantly written, if dark and sombre, tale of life in Warsaw in the nineties...a must read

Dickens has genius to vivify his observation

He deals truly with human nature, which never can degrade; he takes up everything, good, bad, or indifferent, which he works up into a rich alluvial deposit. He is natural, and that never can be ridiculous

I came to Dickens relatively late in life, but in a way, I think that's the best time. When you're a child, all you see is the plum-pudding characterization and twisting-and-turning storylines, and though that is part of the juicy pleasure of Dickens, you need to be an adult to get the heartbreaking measure of his genius. And nothing shows that more, for me, than David Copperfield. It's the fullest, most breathtakingly truthful story of life - not for nothing was it Freud's favorite novel.

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

The greatest comic writer ever

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

Sublime comic genius

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in

Lovely

Moving and intelligent

Magnetic, unpretentious and bursting with one-liners

Jewell's readability and emotional intelligence make her the cream of pop fiction

Fans of chick-lit will understand when I say that this is a book you simply disappear into