Manning knows a good modern romance when she sees one.

This brilliant story is classic chick-lit with plenty of laughs. 4 stars

Read Sarra Manning's hysterical Nine Uses For an Ex-Boyfriend

Smart, funny, painful and acutely observed, this is definitely not your average chick-lit. Buy it for your sister, your daughter and your best friend, and don't be surprised to find the males of your household reading it over your shoulder.

What we have here are the ingredients of an across-the-board smash hit: sympathetic characters, an exotic, unknowable setting and a plot that will carry you along more convincingly than any of the fictions used by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Adam Johnson has managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I’ve read… The Orphan Master’s Son deserves a place up there with dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World

Johnson unleashes a big, thrilling, and fully realized talent

A clever, wildly original novel, with an ultimately thrilling plot

Adam Johnson has pulled off literary alchemy, first by setting his novel in North Korea, a country that few of us can imagine, then by producing such compelling characters whose lives unfold at breakneck speed. I was engrossed right to the amazing conclusion. The result is pure gold, a terrific novel

A fascinating insight into one of the world's most closed-off nations

...a feat of sorcery that is audacious and utterly unsettling... Johnson has a remarkable eye for detail... to evoke at once what it feels like to be in such a place, and how it must have felt had things been very different there, are vast feats that Adam Johnson accomplishes with ingenuity and with towering empathy

Remarkable... Mr. Johnson is a wonderfully flexible writer who can pivot in a matter of lines from absurdity to atrocity. We don't know what's really going on in that strange place, but a disquieting glimpse suggesting what it must be like can be found in this brilliant and timely novel

Mr. Johnson has written a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice

Johnson's imaginative gifts are in full flower [in The Orphan Master's Son]

One image that lingered in the wake of Kim Jong Il's recent death was ordinary North Koreans overcome by grief, breaking down in the street over the loss of the ''Dear Leader'' who had terrorized them for years. Could they truly be so sad about the loss of this despot? Were they acting out of fear?... The answers Adam Johnson imagines are both vivid and chilling

Adam Johnson’s novel is likely to feature among the best-of lists for 2012... highly recommended

The surreal peculiarities of North Korea are conjured in this brilliant multivoiced novel... laced with a mixture of parody and horror, which is all the more hilarious for being so hard to tell apart

Stunningly good

Like an epic version of George Orwell’s 1984, this novel ranges from the bottom of North Korea’s social ladder to its top, with plenty of affecting, wayward and even comic supporting characters. It’s the horror and absurdity of life in a totalitarian state as it might have been depicted by Balzac

Remarkable and heartbreaking . . . To [the] very short list of exceptional novels that also serve a humanitarian purpose The Orphan Master’s Son must now be added

Both visceral and gracious in approach he delicately balances the physical stress and strain of everyday lives with mental and emotional tolls