The handsome bindings are only the cherry on top of what is already a cake without compare

He exhausts superlatives

'A riveting tale...Matthew Hervey has now joined Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe and Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey'

'The novel's re-creation of the period ... should keep fans of the regency military-romance genre happy'

'Confirms his undoubted talents and marks him out as the heir to Patrick O'Brian and C.S.Forester'

What a wonderful novel! The lush prose kept me turning pages as surely as the compelling plot did. Suspenseful, richly imagined, and ultimately hopeful, The Year of Fog is a keeper. Michelle Richmond is a talent to watch.

In this spare page-turner, Richmond draws complex tensions from a the set setup of a child gone missing...Wholly effective...beautifully paced

As Clare Clark's third novel so lushly illustrates, Louisiana has never been the safest place to live... this eye-opening account of Louisiana's early history conjures up a nicely gothic landscape

'Splendid news...Captain Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons and ADC to the Duke of Wellington is back in the saddle...A marvellous read, paced like a well-balanced symphony. This is more than a ripping yarn...I look forward enormously to hearing more of Hervey's exploits; he is as fascinating on horseback as Jack Aubrey is on the quarterdeck'

A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday

The supreme novelist of his generation

Dazzling... Profound and urgent

A brilliant novel.It is McEwan writing on absolute top form

Refreshing and engrossing, dense with revelation. Superb

A rich book, sensuous and thoughtful... McEwan has found in Saturday the right form to showcase his dazzling talents

McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing

Two characters so vibrant they step straight off the page

McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible significance

McEwan's style is lean and clear...every sentence feels carefully crafted, the words all perfectly in place

A tightly focused human drama... McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous... The bedroom scene itself is carried off brilliantly

A fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowered to devastating effect

McEwan is the kind of author who can say more in a sentence than most can say in a chapter...This is a thoughtful book which provokes thought. But more immediately than that, this is a book which, while managing to be very funny, gives us a wonderful and moving portrait of a specific time, and two of its hostages, and of how to make a mess of love

McEwan conveys the near-numinous significance of a single moment with quiet, almost unbearable grace

A heavenly read