Kingsley Amis's coruscating tour de force...

Certain of his place up alongside P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell among the English comic masters of the twentieth century.

The disorientating world of The Alteration is the same but different, familiar yet strange

An atmospheric and accomplished ghost story.

A taut, elegantly written ghost story… Wielding her skill at bringing history to life in the small, dismal details of the post-war period, and showing off her talents as a poet in her mesmerising depiction of possession, Dunmore is on fine form here.

The art of the ghost story requires delicate balance. The supernatural itself does not have to be convincing. It is enough that characters in the fiction are convinced by it. This was Scott's way in, to give only one example, The Bride of Lammermoor and also Buchan's in that remarkable and uncanny novel, The Dancing Floor and in his short stories about the supernatural. It is Dunmore's here too, in this beautifully written tale, and because she achieves this delicate balance, it comes off splendidly.

the best kind of ghostly tale - one that has you pondering its implications - and checking the back of dark cupboards - long after the final page

Helen Dunmore's exquisitely written ghost story works its way with spooky subtlety into your imagination.

A powerful evocation of period, and the tricks the mind can play on itself, its unadorned prose builds a chilling effect reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw.

Her latest work is not a new departure but a development of familiar strengths: drawing us in to a compelling fictional world, populated by characters who live and love with vivid self-awareness. Dunmore has a sharp eye, and a fine-pen, for the hairline cracks in a new marriage ... Dunmore's gift, familiar from The Siege and The Betrayal, is to use a finely drawn domestic setting to show the great events of European history on a human scale.

An unnerving breathlessly told love affair

Beautifully written

I love ghost stories and this one is hugely atmospheric.

I really enjoyed the authentic wartime detail in this book.

The ideal ghost story for Halloween ... Full of suspense ... If you loved Woman in Black, you'll love this atmospheric tale.

This book is spooky, erotic and evocative. We loved it.

A magnificently grotesque fantasia.

Like all great Gothic works, Luckenbooth deals in duality: good/evil, light/dark ... Fagan comes at Edinburgh like a voracious lover, eager to explore both its conspicuous beauty and its secret places ... Fagan's writing sparkles most when she is describing landscape ... Luckenbooth is a horror story, originally and beautifully told.

[Fagan's] sinuous, supernatural story unwinds down nine decades ... Her narrative weaves between the real and the spirit world.

Luckenbooth is a compulsive study of our entanglement with place and each other. Brimming with character, subversion and decadence, Fagan builds a striking portrait of the Scottish city's deep-seated repression and toxicity and the grand strength of its inhabitants as they push the city into a modern age. An exhilarating, courageous story of the need to expose the evils of our communal past, Luckenbooth is nothing short of a masterpiece.

An exuberant, raucous book.

Brilliantly strange ... From the start, Luckenbooth gives the feel of a legend or fairy story ... Time periods slip about, gleefully penetrating one another. A multistorey horror story reveals itself obliquely in fragments across a number of years and viewpoints, weirdly paced, the action rushed and breathless, generalised, then freezing for a moment on an unexpected scene or event ... Everyone in the novel is a chimera of one sort or another, caught between forms, illuminated from inside by the light of their own unkempt ideas and desires ... Fagan's booth of stories - her Cornell box of frenzies, tragedies and delights - offers the present moment in the endless war between love and capital. It's brilliant.

Masterly ... A lesser writer would struggle to control this cacophony of voices but what marks out Luckenbooth is the fierce intelligence driving Fagan's tale ... This is a mad god's dream of a book - it deserves to be shortlisted for every prize going this year.

Impossible to adequately describe this extraordinarily inventive novel. You'll just have to read it yourself. Early days, I know, but suffice to say this one's already heading for my books of the year list together with both my Women's Prize for Fiction and Booker Prize wish lists.

One of the hottest titles right now, Jennie Fagan's Luckenbooth has won all round acclaim.

The novel unfolds like a set of dark short stories, with a different character narrating or guiding each one. But there's a twist: Luckenbooth is not just haunted by the realities of time and history, but also by the strong musk of the gothic imagination ... Thickly worked and carefully assembled, the novel functions as a claustrophobic chiller and as a testament to lives led beyond the margins and in the shadows.

Luckenbooth ... is littered with lines like this. The sort of lines that demand to be read and reread: splendid in isolation, electric in combination. Fagan writes with drama. She can pick out the fine detail, in neat brush strokes, no doubt, but it is in drawing her arm back and attacking a story with great, sweeping lyricism that she propels Luckenbooth forward, dragging the reader through the 20th century, as experienced by a compelling cast of characters.

Slips and slides through layers of history, tears in the fabric of time and a series of strange shape shifting characters - it's a wonderful work that is a trip into a spectral interzone but also staged in a warped reality - great writing and a major talent.

A novel for readers with sophisticated tastes.

Uniquely gripping visions of the hidden social, economic and spiritual forces at play in 20th-century Edinburgh.

Dazzlingly ambitious.

As sexy and horrifying as any fairy story, it is a book concerned, not only with a structure, but with structures: alphabetical, architectural, societal, what they are built upon and how they crumble

Prize-winning author Jenni Fagan does not disappoint with her latest novel, Luckenbooth, which is easily her most compelling yet. In her usual poetic style, Fagan tells of a nine-storey Edinburgh tenement just off the Royal Mile that is creaking with secrets. Throughout this haunting novel, characters' secrets and memories live on in the howling gales of the spirit world, desperate to re-enter their lives. The narrative takes us through eight decades - from 1910 to 1999 - working its way up all nine floors of the building in hopscotch fashion, allowing for an intriguing interpretation of 20th-century life in the capital. Prepare to be transported into a Fagan's weird and wonderful imagination. It is a whirlwind read and one that I could not put down until the final page had turned.

As sexy and horrifying as any fairy story, it is a book concerned, not only with a structure, but with structures: alphabetical, architectural, societal, what they are built upon and how they crumble.

An Edinburgh tenement building is haunted by tall stories and unnerving strangers, from William Burroughs to the devil's daughter, in this weird and wonderful gothic confection.

Her "world building" is highly effective, and each character fully inhabits their decade. Fagan's writing is anchored in societal issues, the wrongs done and the ways individuals have challenged those wrongs and asserted their individuality and sexuality in ways that might make them seem misfits, outcasts. Fagan certainly pulls no punches and is determined that these passionate, authentic stories should not be confined to the periphery.

A deliciously weird gothic horror

An ambitious and ravishing novel that will haunt me long after