Nothing less than brilliant, often highly amusing and, ultimately life affirming

Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night

The beauty and precision of Brookner's writing is rightly praised each time she publishes a novel, but what is less often remarked on is her daring...like Graham Greene, she draws the reader into a world that has a character and signature all of its own...Brookner's wry, dry lightness of touch creates a bloom on the darkness of her characters' sufferings...Strangers is a novel of sober brilliance, and the unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist

No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition and this book is possibly her finest

A novel of great stylistic beauty and psychological truth...the pitiless depiction of the final stages of life - and the refusal to allow her characters any consolation - makes Strangers as great a reflection on fear and regret as Philip Larkin's poem Aubade or Beckett's Endgame

In the hands of a lesser novelist, her stories of human frailty would be depressing, but she manages to make them sparkle with life - and always with hope...consistently absorbing

Strangers is, in its own way, definitive. A more frightening, demoralising account of how hard life can be, without work, and above all without family, would be difficult to conceive...Brookner has given classic expression to what she sees to be a central truth of the human condition, absolute loneliness at the last...nothing less than a great horror story

Anita Brookner is a distinguished and defiant writer whose books occupy a unique place in English literature. Her subject is the best one: the definition of human nature. Although her novels often convey the loneliness inherent in the human condition, they do so in such an acute and bold way that loneliness itself is shown to be a state as tempestuous and startling as any other sort of crisis. In Brookner's hands, in her descriptions so vivid and exact, it can be exhilarating...her books are unfailingly well written, they give voice and a sense of fierce entitlement to a sort of existence that might otherwise go unrecorded...Brookner's is a literature that may be harsh but it is absolutely necessary

Paul Sturgis is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect...a brisk and moving story

Cohen riffs impressively on countless Web-related matters, from chaos to code to venture capital to Y2K... [He] also recognizes the laughs and peril at this technologically challenging stage of the human comedy and its new questions about what people are searching for, how the results may affect them, and what it all may cost

To sum this up in Web terms, he'll make you want to be an angel investor in his stuff. What's a book but a public offering? You'll want to be in on the ground floor

In Mr Cohen's hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we know - the link, the click - to the one we tend to forget: the human... Mr. Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita

Cohen, a key member of the United States' under-40 writers' club (along with Nell Freudenberger and Jonathan Safran Foer), is a rare talent who makes highbrow writing fun and accessible

[Cohen has] manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity... Language - not elision - is the primary material of Cohen's oeuvre, and his method of negotiating his way toward meaning is like powering straight through a thick wall of words... The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique

Like [David Foster] Wallace, Cohen is clearly concerned wtih the depersonalizing effects of technology, broken people doing depraved things, and how the two intersect in tragic (and, sometimes, hilarious) ways. The franticness with which he writes about these themes is, at times, Wallace-esque

What dazzles here is a Pynchonesque verbal dexterity, the sonic effect of exotic vocabulary, terraced sentences robust pusn and metaphors and edgy, Tarantino-like dialogue

In Mr. Cohen’s hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know—the link, the click—to the one we tend to forget: the human. . . . Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita

Enthralling… Awe-inspiring

Cohen is immensely clever, witty, and indeed funny. He also knows about technology, and thus his novel deals with the world in the age of the internet

Book of Numbers brilliantly and rigorously examines a question that confronts literature today: What does the explosion of information from the internet mean for the future of storytelling?

Fascinating...for chutzpah alone, Cohen's chaotic fantasia certainly impresses

Frequently amazing, [it is] the first work of fiction to engage fully with the internet and its influence on modern living

There are wonderful things here cloaked with an invisibility spell, tucked away in the middle of the book, where only the stubbornest seeker after enchantment will find them

Groundbreaking.

A really intriguing premise.

On the surface, Underground Airlines is a well-crafted thriller, suspenseful and with fascinating characters. But not far below the surface is a philosophical debate about how one small change of events in history can put the world on a different path.

‘Intriguing’