This impressive book limits itself to neither the light-hearted nor the undisturbably grave

He has a great deal to say-a likeable, readable and profoundly gripping book

Ten years of Salman Rushdie's incisive non-fiction

Rushdie has used all his experience and literary skills to defend what is most worth defending: our freedom to think, and say, and write what we want, without fear for our lives

Rushdie is the most assiduous reader of other people's work, a true and tireless man of literature...a total believer in the power of the word

The view from America may be darkening, but Anne Tyler's new novel sheds a warm light on the ordinary human needs and actions that shore up American ideals of ethnic integration, neighbourliness and family values

Out of this everyday material she spins gold: stories so achingly truthful, so achingly funny, so sad and so real that you can only marvel...her trademark blend of observant comedy and tragedy, and her window into the human heart, are gloriously apparent

There can hardly be a more American 20th-century writer than Anne Tyler. Anyone who has grown up with her books…has by now become familiar with her unflashy mastery of the national idiom, her dour whimsy, her tapestries of suffocating families

Anne Tyler draws a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous - its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility. So sure is her tone, so graceful her style, that the reader absorbs without literary indigestion a narrative constructed almost entirely of grand set pieces of domestic comedy... Articulated in her fine-grained prose, the pure kindliness of her finale expresses something of the forgotten goodness of the American dream

A magnificent piece of character drawing

Digging to America is another superb novel, warm-hearted and funny

A return to form by a great writer...beautifully done

A small exquisitely painted canvas. Don't miss it

Keen-eyed and funny

There is so much truth here, as Tyler strips away the issue of ethnic difference to reach the heart of her complex and compelling matter

Warm and optimistic, this story about adoption raises issues of belonging and identity

Tyler possesses a remarkable ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, which makes reading her work like tucking into tea and cake on a cosy Sunday afternoon

Full of excruciatingly comic set-pieces, this is an immensely satisfying, yet subtle, read

Tenderly observed and lifted by humour, Digging to America is a complex novel that asks if anyone can ever truly fit in. In answering that question Ms Tyler has woven her magic once again

As in her previous books, the writing here makes for wholesome, comforting fare, spiced as always with urbane wit and a knack for nailing the small truths behind fine details

In Digging to America, Tyler exhibits her knack for softening the sharp edges of human contact, showing people with smudges of vulnerability on their faces as they dig toward each other

Her prose is at once unpretentious and elegiac, like a photograph by Dorothea Lange, and her imagery has staying power

Deft and wise prose... [Tyler's] skill at turning everyday occurrences into amazing storytelling gets better and better

Redemptive