Sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, the reader comes to know Diana Wynne Jones through this book in ways which few conventional autobiographies allow ... Reflections is certainly a compelling read for anyone interested in writing, in how an author sees children as readers, in fantasy, and in the shifting fashions of the children’s lit scene from the seventies to the present day. And, of course, it is essential reading for all those, many of them adult, devoted to Wynne Jones’ work.

For Jones, fantasy is a medium where magic stands as a metaphor for thoughts, offering readers a forum where they can both recognise and validate their most powerful daydreams ... This present book [is] an admirable commentary on all [the] work from a writer of rare distinction.

Often humorous, always fascinating, Diana Wynne Jones describes the influence of her own (astounding) childhood on her novels...Certainly of use to anyone interested in the importance of children's literature, and also an absorbing insight into the developing thoughts of a great author.

May justly join the classic American list

A heartbreaking masterpiece of a novel... tremendously ambitious and fiendishly clever

Intelligent, exhilarating and darkly comic Dickensian in scope. Quite stunning

Vaclav and Lena is a wonderful achievement, generous, playful, moving, and refreshing... Give this novel a few short pages, and I guarantee you'll want to read it to the end.

There are books you enjoy, and then there are books you live in. Haley Tanner plunges you into the Russian émigré community in Brooklyn, where two souls connect under a maternal watchful eye. Tanner's assured narrative voice finds new ways to describe emotion and character, bringing the reader up short again and again with small shocks of awareness. This book is sad, funny, true, and shot through with grace.

What is most intriguing about Tanner's debut, it its surprising darkness, the secrets that lie beneath the cheerful boy-meets-girl of its surface narrative...there are unexpected moments that linger in the memory long beyond the final page of this smart, proficient debut.

Set in New York's Russian émigré community, this is a quirky tale about two children from different worlds who are destined to be together. Amid dark revelations, the relationship between these vividly painted characters will stay with you.

A moving, funny, richly drawn story of a young man's attempts to find out who he wants to be when there are so many others who know best. Full of real pleasures and unexpected wisdom, this book sweeps you along

A beautiful, bittersweet novel

Written with wisdom and deliciously subtle wit, in the tradition of Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Francesca Segal has a remarkable ability to bring characters vividly to life who are at once warm, funny, complex, and utterly recognizable. This is a wonderfully readable novel: elegant, accomplished and romantic

An elegant little novel and a real delight to read... an updated version of the 1920 Pulitzer-prize-winning The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - the parallels are close, but given how deeply anti-Semitic the New York social elite was in that period, transplanting the story to a Jewish community is not only clever, it also gives a wider, more general point of reference, in quite a subtle way

·A mature love story that meditates on community and ties that bind…a contemporary recasting of that adroit classic, The Age of Innocence…Just like Old New York, this is a community that has its own way of doing things, and The Innocents takes its cue from Wharton’s anthropological musings, doubling as a primer on the importance of the Friday night dinner, the symbolism of the Rosh Hashanah, and the evolution of the Christmakah party…Segal…is a writer of instinctive warmth who can divertingly lavish a full page on a breakfast spread, yet she never loses sight of this haunted truth’

The Innocents has garnered her a next-Zadie-Smith style buzz.

Segal writes with delicacy, accumulating details that create the texture of Adam and Rachel’s world… Adam is well drawn and not unsympathetic, and Segal has skillfully created a cast of secondary characters, including Ziva, a survivor of the Holocaust.

It takes chutzpah to appropriate such a well-loved classic but Segal parallels the two convention-bound worlds with aplomb… [a] classily composed comedy of manners

Impresive debut…a poised text

Wittily observant

Hugely enjoyable first novel... The end result falls somewhere between Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad (about a matriarchal Jewish rabbi) and David Nicholl's One Day (with its theme of mismatched love) and is all the more pleasing for that

Elegant little novel and a real delight to read

It's an old saying that you choose your friends but not your family and the family reunion has been well-used in literature, but Haddon breathes new life into it. He's never shied away from the difficult subjects and he deals sensitively with a child's burgeoning homosexuality but his real skill, his genius is in his understanding of mental problems, that disassociation between the mind and the brain. It's a book which is so right in every small detail but a gem when taken altogether.

The book gave me the ever-changing, fascinating and the feeling that I was looking through a looking glass. The eight of them have their own secrets, longings and resentments which only make them as human as you and I. The writing zips in montages and sometimes it becomes difficult to figure who is carrying the baton, though once you get used to the writing, it isn’t difficult to figure. The language and symbolism is weaved very well for a story of a dysfunctional family. In some parts, it almost reminded me of Faulkner’s, “The Sound and the Fury”. The Red House by Mark Haddon is a rollercoaster of emotions and all it works surprisingly well and all adds up at the end of the book. I would definitely and most certainly recommend this read for the long summer weekend that comes up.

Haddon can marry extraordinary perception with uncluttered language... He also burrows into the minds of his protagonists with astute precision

It looks like Mark Haddon is about to have a great big success all over again

Brilliantly readable… Comic and bittersweet

A closely observed domestic drama…

Characteristically original, deftly observed...

A beautifully orchestrated novel that gently questions how we define success

[Haddon] shows a knack for portraying family dynamics…

Mark Haddon proves himself a master of the domestic drama

Gripping drama

With its slightly skewed perspective and the relative freshness of its approach, HHhH compels us once again to consider that this, surely, was humanity's lowest point: a war waged, not against those who thwarted Germany's territorial ambitions, but against all that was good and decent in the human soul. In so doing, it confounds those who would decry post-modernism as wilfully obscure, relativistic and lacking in conviction

French newcomer Laurent Binet hits the ground running in the engrossing novel within a novel

A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance

This book fully justifies the lavish praise adorning its author

Dazzling... It's stunningly brilliant

Stunning

Binet provides both context and impressive detail on the eventual assassination of Heydrich