Magnificent. I insist everyone reads Adam Thorpe's new translation.

A handsomely bound hardback edition that perfectly befits the beautiful new translation therein... we are pretty confident that Thorpe's bash at Bovary is a contender for the new best English version out there. Sensitive and musical, and simply and wittily annotated, it's got "new classic" written all over it. Plus it's dressed in this really elegant embroidered design by Karen Nichols, so everything gangs up and makes it basically a must-buy.

Flaubert's 1856 novel begins with marriage and what follows is the archetypal tale of a desperate housewife

Mesmerising

The most scandalous novel of all time

Madame Bovary is profoundly, shatteringly real

Fairy stories end with the lovers marrying and living happy ever after. Jane Austen's novels keep that pattern. The great realist novels study at length what happens after marriage, within marriages, within families and businesses. Madame Bovary... is both terrifying and simultaneously gleeful over its own accuracy

This is an extraordinary, complex novel. Filled with romantic longings, Emma is a troubled wife married to a doctor in the French provinces and driven almost mad with boredom. In it, Flaubert drives deep into the female psyche exposing intimate, pitiful and, ultimately, destructive fantasies

A work of brilliance

The mysteries are never tainted by explanation, merely beautifully described, delivering a hypnotic read

Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility

Vintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels

[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done

Murakami's most famous coming of age novel of love, loss and longing

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed.

[A] treat . . . Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done.

One of the most poignant and evocative novels I have ever read

Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates heartbreak and loss of faith

Quinn brings the period in question vividly to life: his research is exemplary, and his subject absorbing

All the ingredients of an upmarket page-turner

Ambitious, gripping and disturbingly well done

Beyond its splendid feel for the era’s chat and patter, the novel pits philanthropy and opportunism, ideals and selfishness, bracingly at odds

This novel is refreshingly different and contains a cornucopia of wonderful material and evocative descriptions

The best book I’ve read in ages… You have to read it.