absolutely delectable

an erotic classic . . . I love the way Tourney describes female desire

Despite an awkward start, it makes an uncomplicated, easily digestible, cheering read: so it's perhaps unsurprising that it became the best-selling French novel of 2008, moving over half a million copies and being translated into 32 languages

It is a confident author who works with a large cast of characters, and in many instances - notably the children - Gavalda nails it

Gavalda's touching writing makes what could have been a melancholy text into a beautifully insightful novel.

The book is original and wildly ambitious... his (Rich) inventiveness is joyous

If ambition alone wins prizes, Nathaniel Rich's mantelpiece should be creaking by the end of the year

Rich's novel reads a little like a hybrid of The New York Trilogy and Up the Faraway Tree, with frequent appearances of wood sprites and other forest-dwelling creatures. The fantasy element develops throughout and Rich is at his most successful in the throes of it, building towards his mad denouement. Like with many debuts, there is a little too much going on, but it is original and intelligent, and Rich is an elegant writer with a great deal of promise. He is definitely one to watch

Hugely inventive and playful debut

Imaginatively folkloric...the experience of sharing in its feverish tussling with ideas is consistently exuberant

When Rich writes of his characters, their affections, their impulses and failings, he writes generously and movingly...Surprising friendships, small intimacies of fidelity and kindness, large gestures of joy: The Mayor's Tongue does all these so well, pointing the way to Nathaniel Rich's promise as a fiction writer

The Mayor's Tongue is a spare masterpiece of postmodernism, an incisive fable whose myriad threads of plot and thought take the inhibitions of our era to task and make Rich's first novel a New York Trilogy for the new millennium

The sheer inventiveness is hard to resist

Intriguing debut

There's plenty here to pull you in and, it must be said, I do really like the cover

Stories, generations and nationalities collide in what is an entertaining and superior novel