A dazzling, crazy-quilt monument to the imagination

An eccentric, madly ambitious scheme to display life all at once. The product of a hectically ingenious intelligence, like James Joyce's

Amazing, moving and lovable

The finest novel to appear in French since Beckett's trilogy

Very funny and very sad... A treasure-chest of stories, something to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever responded to works on the same scale and in the same spirit as Rabelais and Chaucer and Sterne

Relationships and family life are captured by Anna Quindlen in a beautiful, intelligent way.

An intelligent, highly entertaining novel laced with acute perceptions about the nature of day-to-day family life

Tender, taut, full of insight, yet with a darkness at its centre

Excellently done; the minutiae of domestic landscapes, the lunatic irrationality of family quarrels, the torments of sibling rivalry

Funny, heart-hammering, wise...superb entertainment

A terrific writer... She's changed my perception on life

A classic of contemporary Americana... variously funny and horrifying and finally, quietly, terribly moving

A book that should join those few that every literate person will have to read

A novelist who knows what a proper story is . . . [Tyler is] not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well

In her ninth novel she has arrived at a new level of power