A heart-warming tale of female friendship, fizzing with Fforde's distinctive brand of humour

A spare, bewitching, beautifully written book... Burnside nimbly delineates the border where the actual and illusory meet: on both sides he finds dark, flinty human truths

The Devil's Footprints is a classic tale with an old-fashioned, gripping plot. But it is also helplessly good at the things that Burnside loves best: geography, the neighbours, the way people's lives go, and the way people's other, secret lives turn out

Both this novel and Gift Songs are superb achievements. To be both a poet and a novelist is highly unusual. To write so outstandingly well in both genres is a rarity indeed

His is a devouring eloquence, unfazed by generic difference and widely admired... what happens on almost every page is absorbing... It can be said of John Burnside's novel what was said by this journal at their outset: that they are the work of an "extraordinarily good writer"

As always, Burnside writes with an almost preternatural acuity. His descriptions are little masterpieces of concision... a chilly, stark and unforgettable fable

Burnside's dark lyricism gives the ordinary surfaces of life a sinister geometry and his startling images cling to the imagination

Part of the charm of [Burnside's] writing comes from its appeal to people's longing, in this atheistical age, for the miraculous, for grace, for forgiveness... Burnside has a new collection of poems, Gift Songs, which echoes St Augustine and T S Eliot. It works well alongside the novel, exploring how a writer puts experience into language, how language paradoxically shapes experience, how a poet must strive to express the seemingly unsayable

Burnside is a writer of great skill and subtlety... As befits a poet of Burnside's considerable reputation, both the inner and outer landscapes are beautifully realised and the novel has the resonant simplicity of the folklore from which it is drawn

Undeniably entertaining throughout

[An] engaging and well-written novel, which reads almost as a piece of folklore

A gratifying, brooding book

A wry satire on girlish obsession

The hugely affecting tale of a teen crush and its consequences decades later, this is a subtle and flawlessly written love story

Pearson's nostalgic narrative clearly marries the pangs of adolescence to mid-life regret. A pitch-perfect portrait of the teenage self.

Funny and poignant, it will also remind you why you'd never want to be 13 again!

... examines the extraordinary lengths people will go to when driven by love.

Those who survive do dreadful things. This is the nub of their experiences and also, hints the author of our own.

A highly accomplished debut, this is a chilling portrait of racial tension, social immorality, betrayal and love, and also an atmospheric examination of the end of innocence.

The writing is strong and though the sections featuring Gay's earlier life lose momentum, the story picks up pace when the girls' paths become entwined and the conclusion is compelling and thrillingly macabre.

This fictional account of a true story gives a darkly shocking version of the events surrounding this tragic case.

Brilliantly melds a factual post-war murder into a dark fictional tale