Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

Stefan Zweig was a late and magnificent bloom from the hothouse of fin de siecle Vienna

Zweig is one of the masters of the short story and novella, and by 'one of the masters' I mean that he's up there with Maupassant, Chekhov, James, Poe, or indeed anyone you care to name

A new favourite writer of mine

Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game

His great achievement in short form

If you're looking for a book to take you by surprise, Salley Vickers' latest is the perfect choice

A carefully considered, micro-detailed examination of a modern America ... Victor is a compelling, multi-layered character.

Underground Airlines is bold, brilliant, and beautiful -- everything you could want from a novel, Ben Winters delivers ten-fold. He's a writer to watch, one of exceptional vision and imagination whose characters draw the reader in to the point that an alternate history seems not only plausible, but the only one that counts until the final page.

Smart, quick and tricky, Ben Winters knows how to pull off a high-concept thriller. Fans of The Man in the High Castle will love Underground Airlines.

Underground Airlines is like nothing I have ever read before. I know it will be a pivot point in my reading life.
Thought you’d wrestled sufficiently with the stain of Slavery? Have a seat. You’ll only need the edge.
By spinning a pounding thriller in a past that did not happen, Winters has somehow wrapped his hands around the catastrophe that did. This is how it might have been, I kept thinking, if history had gone that way. But the moral shock at the heart of the book: Winters’s rabbit hole is not strange enough, the gulf between that and this is not wide enough. Underground Airlines does what all great speculative fiction wants to do – show the reader that Everything is possible. That’s the good news and bad. The novel's many-named narrator descends from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – his voice is mesmeric, it comes from any corner, it can boil with savagery, sing with grace or do pretty much anything in between. Oh, and he descends from Jason Bourne as well; he has mad field skills. So does Winters. You’re set down in motion on a tilted mirror and then it’s turn after gripping turn – my every next hour depended on which way he went.

Brilliantly written, terrifyingly conceived, Underground Airlines had me from the first page to the last. Many writers might have been content to set a few characters loose in the middle of the kind of powerful premise — slavery in four states never ended —put to work here, but Winters gives us gripping plot, clear-eyed social commentary and chilling implications. This may be alternate history, but what it has to say about actual, enduring race and racism cuts awfully close to the 21st century American bone.

In this alternative history, President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated en route to his inauguration. His death leads legislators to come together with one last proposal to keep the Union intact. It works, and today the status of slavery is decided state by state. In the Hard Four states, “peebs” (Persons Bound to Labor) are legally enchained, working 12 hours on and eight off. If a peeb escapes, the federal government is enjoined to find and return him to his owners. Victor works undercover for the U.S. Marshals, tracking down other black men. Now he’s hunting a peeb named Jackdaw. Something’s wrong, though, and he can’t figure out what. Fast paced and filled with menace, the story has an ambience that makes it special. In Victor’s supposedly “free” world, everywhere there are traps for people of color—free doesn’t mean equal and definitely doesn’t mean safe. What’s startling is that Victor’s experiences could well happen in the contemporary world. VERDICT Explosive, well plotted, and impossible to put down, this alt-hist by the Edgar Award–winning author of the “Last Policeman” trilogy will attract readers of all genres.

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man meets Blade Runner in this outstanding alternate history thriller.

The world of Underground Airlines is realised in incredible details, fascinating to read even when it’s truly uncomfortable … It’s frightening how plausible and believable Ben H. Winters’ alternate reality America really is.

A terrific premise … the haunting scenes of slavery in the Hard Four will stay with you.

Underground Airlines is a powerful work … a brave, controversial thriller.

A great premise … but slavery scenes will haunt you.

An almost painfully timely novel.

Winters does an amazing job of painting a world that never was but, in his hands, is frighteningly plausible … Winters has crafted a thrilling, tightly plotted and nourish thriller.

If you’re looking for a brilliant, smart, chilling page turner for what’s left of the summer, I can recommend Ben H. Winters.

Winters does an amazing job of painting a world that next we was, but in his hands, are frighteningly plausible … Winters could not have written a more timely novel.

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’

There is more than one idiot in this delightful and slyly funny coming-of-age novel... Will strike a chord for any former fresher who felt the same way. (That would be all of us.)

Batuman, in seemingly writing a novel about nothing, has produced an incredibly complex, accurate and funny novel.

I never want to finish it, so I’m reading it very slowly.

Every page is thicketed with jokes, riffs, theories of language. It’s a portrait of an intellectual and sentimental education that offers almost unseemly pleasure.

Elif Batuman is a real writer, and should be allowed to write whatever the hell she likes.

Selin’s deadpan narration is often very funny indeed

This is a capacious book that creates an alternative world

At once clever and clueless, Batuman’s heroine shows us with just how messy it can be to forge a self

One of the best novels I read all summer... a painstakingly accurate depiction of the balancing act that is student-life. As clever as it is funny, Batuman's debut novel allows us to laugh at our own stupidity, and celebrate our own cluelessness.

The Idiot... manages the trick of being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually being a comedy. It just observers life, in all its truth and is hilarious for page after page.

I finally read The Idiot by Elif Batuman and everyone is correct, she is clearly a genius