Among the technical exchanges with the control tower and references to cockpit instruments mysterious to the layman, or the description of the ever-changing cloud barrier, his assured, luminous writing is that of a man who has his destiny in his own hands and knows where to make his touch-down.

Writing with such precision of what there is on board an aircraft and how we perceive it, he has aimed to reduce life to a minimum, the better to explore our way of understanding it.

It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it

Reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader for the first time, unencumbered by the pidgin archaisms of previous translations, ringing with mastery and truth

It may sound pretentious, or strange, but I can remember the weeks (three weeks, to be precise) I spent reading War and Peace as a peak experience of sustained excitement and deep delight. Part of the delight was the largeness and strangeness of this world - the sense of the vastness and extremes of Russia, the unboundedness of everything

There is a good argument to say that any decent library must make room for War and Peace

War and Peace... is gleefully experimental... Tolstoy is the greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is economical... [An] outlandish, wonderful novel

The greatest of all novels. Read it again, to test and savour the infallible truth of Tolstoy’s understanding of every stage and aspect of human life

To read him . . . is to find one's way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane

In War And Peace, richly observed human life - its catastrophes and passions, its thrills and tedium - mark out Tolstoy as a fox, who knows all about the dizzying diversity of existence

Highly and deservedly praised...is a remarkable achievement.

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