One of the Strugatsky brothers is descended from Gogol and the other from Chekhov, but nobody is sure which is which ... A beautiful book

One of the best and most provocative novels I have ever read, in or out of sci-fi

They open windows in the mind and then fail to close them all, so that, putting down one of their books, you feel a cold breeze still lifting the hairs on the back of your neck.

A maestra's portrait of her age. . . remarkable

Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance

The bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day's vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer

Smith bring[s] this brilliant quartet to a satisfying close

The final flourish of a mazy and beautiful quartet

Sublime

Brilliant

The novel's hopeful message about the healing power of friendship ensures the quartet ends on a feel-good note

A remarkable experiment with timeliness in fiction

Wonderful... unsettling and deeply affecting - the writing is beautifully spare, and captures with such clarity what it means for these four young women to be taught to hope for everything and yet continuously to receive nothing

If I Had Your Face is a vivid, eviscerating depiction of social realism in contemporary Seoul. Frances Cha renders gender and class struggles with forensic detail, in a luminous voice both knowledgeable and compelling.

I love the way Frances Cha rotates between mindsets to look at how beauty and privilege influence the way women live, whilst maintaining a sly lightness

Make way for Frances Cha, an entrancing new voice who guides us into the complexities and contradictions of modern-day Seoul... I devoured it in a single sitting, and so will you.

I loved this book. It offers a fascinating window on a place and culture I knew little about, and yet from the first page it was intensely relatable - I recognised these women like friends, colleagues or sisters. Invigorating in its honesty and near-filmic in its descriptive power, If I Had Your Face is brilliantly-drawn tableau of the universalities of womanhood, the pressures we grapple with, and the way female bonds can carry us through.

Cha's striking first novel follows four young women in Seoul, South Korea trapped in a sphere of impossible beauty standards

A story of four women in Seoul and the way that economic and social realities determine the paths available to them

An intimate, panoramic debut... An enthralling read from the very first page.

A provoking, ultimately inspiring tale of women pushing back against oppressive customs both traditional and new . . . Frances Cha, like her quartet of narrators, has a rebel's heart

An endearing story of female friendship staged against a backdrop of elitism, sexism and the relentless quest for cosmetic perfection... Enthralling

An insightful, powerful story from a promising new voice

Cha's timely debut deftly explores the impact of impossible beauty standards and male-dominated family money on South Korean women

An eye-opening story of female friendship set against the brutal beauty standards of south Korea

Mesmerizing... weaves together the complexities and contradictions of modern-day Seoul, in an ultimately uplifting story of women living in defiance of oppressive customs

A gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal

A gripping portrait of four young women in South Korea... its focus on the tangled and complicated nature of female friendship is universally familiar and fascinating

Hypnotising... you won't want to put it down until the very last page

You'll find sisterhood at the heart of this ambitious book

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller