Heartbeat for teachers

Howzat for a great Yorkshire novel

A wonderful gallery of village characters

Refreshing...hilarious detail

Wry and touching ... the warm and nostalgic story of Jack's efforts to run the school is told with understanding and colourful humour...Sheffield writes with understanding and colourful humour

No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this

Absorbing and unnerving . . . powered by the pressure of good old-fashioned suspense

A murder mystery that's also a brilliant meditation on life, love and death

The writing is stunning, the execution flawless and the plot utterly gripping (4 stars)

An unusual, beautifully written novel

As well as an intriguing literary and metaphysical puzzle, the book is also one of profound and painful humanity, preoccupied with some of the most essential questions about what it means to be a parent and what happens when noble principles are confronted with the grubby details of everyday life

It's a relief after reading a lot of contemporary fiction to come across the sober prose of Coetzee. He doesn't shout at you... He knows what he's doing... The whole novel is a kind of escape act, an elaborate rope trick... magical

This is a book to make you think. This is a book to forcefully turn you away from mindless entertainment and set you on a journey inwards, where you ask yourself the important questions in life. It's philosophy as fiction... Part of his achievement is down to how fit for purpose his prose is. It is remarkably sparse and yet feels dense, weighted with layers and layers of meaning

[A] moving but mysterious story of a lost childhood... Is it possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it's about? Before reading J.M. Coetzee's new novel I might have said no - but now I'm not so sure... [As] disquieting as it is moving... [All] I can say is that ever since I finished it, it's been going round and round inside my head like nothing else I've read in ages

What JM Coetzee writes matters... [A narrative mode] akin to that of Kafka... At once lucid and elusive

Reading JM Coetzee is like swimming in a sea with a calm surface and a savage undertow. His sentences are lean; his subjects menacing: power, race, animal rights and confession

Tormented states of mind, ambivalence and guilt stalk his work, as do the dual influences of Kafka and Beckett

A retelling of the gospels? A fable about Utopian, Chaves-style socialism? Coeztee moves in mysterious, but mesmerising, ways

There are knotty concerns here on reading, on order and chaos, on political engagement, on almost anything you can think of. But, “you think too much,” Elena says to Simón. “This has nothing to do with thinking.”... What Coetzee has given us is a book not of answers but of questions... Coetzee’s prose is clean and efficient, driving the reader on through the mazy stasis of life in Novilla. There is plenty of what, to avoid a cliché, we might call Kafkaish stuff... These qualities, combined with the enjoyable and unaccustomed exercise of thinking about the book – wanting to think about it – all the way through, meant that in a strange sense, The Childhood of Jesus is the most fun I’ve had with a novel in ages

There aren’t many subjects bigger than the question of faith – and with The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee appears to have found a subject worthy of his high-level craftsmanship

An intellectual adventure

A perversely comic, intellectually profound and obscurely allegorical novel

With elegant ease, Jones spins a good old-fashioned comedy of manners