Chipper is the word: Gibbons's heroines are plucky, determined and quietly hedonistic. But she can do melancholy with the best of them, too, not to mention melodrama

Stella Gibbons…an exception to that old canard: women can't make us laugh

The Jane Austen of the 20th century

Stella is stellar

Stella Gibbons’s gift is very special

Murakami reveals throughout, along with turn-on-a-sixpence plotting and joyous satirical energy, a old-fashioned interest and accomplishment in creating a corps of living characters: exotic and eccentric, but always real

A world-class writer who takes big risks. . . . If Murakami is the voice of a generation then it is the generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

A Japanese Phillip K. Dick with a sense of humor . . . [Murakami belongs] in the topmost ranks of writers of international stature.

Loaded with . . . mystery, mysticism, sex and rock 'n' roll. . . . Fast-moving and funny. . . . The narrative voice . . . pulls like a diesel.

The plot is addictive.

There are novelists who dare to imagine the future, but none is as scrupulously, amusingly up-to-the-minute as . . . Murakami.

Vintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels

[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done

Murakami's most famous coming of age novel of love, loss and longing

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed.

[A] treat . . . Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done.

One of the most poignant and evocative novels I have ever read

Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates heartbreak and loss of faith

Quinn brings the period in question vividly to life: his research is exemplary, and his subject absorbing

All the ingredients of an upmarket page-turner

Ambitious, gripping and disturbingly well done

Beyond its splendid feel for the era’s chat and patter, the novel pits philanthropy and opportunism, ideals and selfishness, bracingly at odds

This novel is refreshingly different and contains a cornucopia of wonderful material and evocative descriptions

The best book I’ve read in ages… You have to read it.