Marina Warner's essays and lectures reveal a consistently honest and agile mind preoccupied with the powerful controlling fictions of our lives

She's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings

Clever, witty, erudite and, above all, usefully explanatory, these signs and wonders are a literary cabinet of curiosities for our sadly desultory times

As a leading explorer of a largely unchartered territory, Marina Warner is an impressive, inspiring but never intimidating guide

She is a terrific writer and an original scholar

Joanna Trollope has an uncanny knack of pinpointing key modern domestic dilemmas around which to thicken her absorbing plots

Poignant prose... her novels have always contained the unexpected, but lately they've gained a grittiness which suits the everyday subject matter that lies at the heart of her writing

Playful, unguessable and clever

Intelligent and humane, and there's never a word out of place

Beautifully written, and her treatment of the generation gap between parents and offspring is observed with all the unforced empathy that has become her hallmark

A compulsively readable tragi-comedy of empty nest syndrome... never a dull moment

A feisty read you won't want to put down

A must-read for empty nesters ... this is Trollope at her most poignant

This is a humane, unsentimental study of grief and guilt, which is both moving and unsettling. It's also a softly gripping narrative, without ever resorting to fight scenes, car chases or torture

Margaret Atwood is a wry and perceptive observer of society as well as an original storyteller

Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first century America gives full rein to Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit and astute perception

This is a novel pervaded by violence, sex, terror, but also by contemplation, analysis and – occasionally – by hope… Atwood shockingly reveals what we could be capable of.

A magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece

A triumph

She melds horror and beauty in a story that will disturb the mind forever

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature

A work of genuine force. . .Beautifully written

There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you

Superb...A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history...Exquisitely told