A masterpiece which everybody should read...It deserves to become a classic

No lunacy too weird, no irony too oblique, heart too tender, mischief too black, to dodge the sharp angle of his eye. He slips from the hilarious to the macabre, he celebrates the comedy and plumbs the tragedy of Francisco's life - and of Africa - in prose that grabs you with its precision

Outstanding, finely written

It is hard to know how posterity will regard this remarkable writer, but his terse, honed language was built to last

Magnificent. The beautiful, succinct prose is so incredibly visual, vibrant and visceral

Toibin has created an impressive work of religious imagination...haunting, highly original.

Beautifully crafted

Fearsomely strange, deeply thoughtful

With deceptively modest prose, Tóibín presents the Virgin Mary's story as one of human loss rather than salvation. By doing so he gives us a Mary to identify with rather than venerate.

Daring and very moving

The Testament of Mary, a novella of absences and silences, achieves a shimmering power

Tóibín's take on the most famous mother in history ... is all too believable

[Reveals] Vonnegut’s passions, annoyances, loves, losses, mind and heart . . . The letters stand alone—and stand tall, indeed. . . . Vonnegut’s most human of hearts beats on every page

A well-rounded collection of letters

[The letters] have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity… Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous

Crisply edited... There was something fundamentally goodhearted about Vonnegut. For all his gloom and cantankerousness, he never entirely lost his faith in human nature.