Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the 20th century

Gibbons was an acute and witty observer, and her dissection of the British class system is spot-on

Stella Gibbons is - as always -gay, satirical and entertaining

Gibbons was an acute and witty observer, and her dissection of the British class system is spot-on

You show up a group of characters, all of whom are discontented and unhappy. Yet the feeling that comes through very powerfully is that life is wonderful, in spite of individual bitterness and frustration.

Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes

His insight sparkles in every line

His funniest book since Breakfast of Champions . . . There are nuggets of Vonnegutian wisdom throughout.

Timequake is a novel by, and starring, Kurt Vonnegut . . . What Vonnegut does, which no one can do better, is give a big postmodern shrug . . . You've got to love him.

Humorous, sardonic . . . Timequake makes for irresistible reading that's loaded with more important truths than it lets on . . . Moralizing has never been funnier.

Vonnegut is at his best.

Wonderfully readable

Translators give their wits and craft selflessly in service of others' work; this is a triumph of fidelity and unpretentiousness.

Tom McCarthy's C... a novel blazing with energy and, for all its postmodern ambitions, a rich, old-fashioned yarn

I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy's C also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize.

McCarthy's high-voltage writing runs through the reader like a charge.

New readers could grasp just how boldly he has tried to balance sumptuous period-fiction prose with a mischievous desire to sabotage his chosen form.

An exciting, revealing and touching story

The novel's interest (or lack thereof) lies mainly in its stubborn refusal of anything resembling a narrative payoff...I loved it, right down to the prose, which, unspooling in a vaguely menacing present-continuous, sounds like screenplay instructions to a set designer

A dazzlingly agile novel about the interconnectedness of things

Entertaining as well as ambitious

McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity