Getting lost and succumbing to the mastery of Gabriel García Márquez's storytelling is all part of the joy of this epic tale ... This incredible novel put me under a spell

Drabble excels at describing the minute detail of human behaviour…The Sea Lady is a potent tribute to lost dreams and harsh realities.

An intelligent, full-bodied, big-hearted book

One of the two unquestionable classics of the first order that [Conrad] added to the English novel

To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes

What a book [Moby-Dick] Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points

Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick

That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with

I'd like to write a play as perfect as Emma

A literary phenomenon on the grandest scale – a work of genius

Sublime and sweet melancholy suffuses the story. Beautiful

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

Historical fiction at its best

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close