Isherwood is one of the great mythmakers of his time. The Berlin Novels are masterpieces, funny, darkly innocent explorations of a world Berlin in the Thirties that is now as firmly in the past as Pompeii

Mr Norris Changes Trains is a masterpiece in comic portraiture

In Mr Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood sketches with the lightest of touches the last gasp of the decaying demi-monde and the vigorous world of Communists and Nazis, grappling with each other on the edge of the abyss

Reading Goodbye to Berlin is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently at the windows.

Touching...it will make you laugh, maybe make you cry and keep you reading past bedtime

A wickedly funny, painfully honest look at families, festivities and romantic love

Tender, tough, schmaltzy, witty and heart-warming all at once. Knight has a great comic touch - there are some wonderfully rude bits and a fantastic rant about the ridiculous expectations piled on 21st-century women to be perfect - and writes with a deceptive lightness. At the heart of this funny, affectionate novel is an acknowledgement that families, like love, come in odd shapes and sizes, and that both matter more than anything

Witty enough to make you laugh out loud, but there are moments of real emotion that keep the book from being too light

A superb ear for dialogue...wonderfully comic

Riotously high in laughs and glamour. I defy a festive grump not to be cheered by it

Fast-paced and funny

Influenced by magical realism and the cool prose of modernism, first-time author Chloe Aridjis takes the best from each