'Thurman's novel presents some of the most layered portrayals of New York City life...from seedy employment agency waiting rooms to swank Harlem hot spots'

A cavalcade of perfect joy

Fairly close to perfection

There are periods when I'm not up to the journey, when hope is too much to ask for and I am only fit for ... cowering under the covers with P.G. Wodehouse

The prose . . . is so gloriously funny you can relish the book over and over again.

Quite possibly the funniest book the master of comedy ever wrote.

A sheer joy to read.

'Anything by PG Wodehouse' was a common response when asking around for people's comfort reads. It's very hard to pick just one, but this - with Roderick Spode, Aunt Dahlia and plenty of sneering at cow creamers - is fairly close to perfection.

It's illegal to put together any list of the funniest books in English without including Wodehouse. [His] incredibly delicate descriptive touch (for example, of a particularly burly character: "as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment") and sense of timing elevate a country house farce involving a policeman's hat, a cow-creamer and a would-be British fascist leader into something which glows with an effortless, sunny brilliance.

[Strout] has that rare ability to immerse readers in the world of her characters . . . moments of quiet revelation - infidelities, or glimpses into the indignities of incontinence and cancer - feel poignant and real, but also unsentimental. It is a compassionate, life-affirming read, and a much-needed balm for these trying times

Strout captures the minutiae of recent years with insight and compassion

You would be forgiven for avoiding any pandemic-set novels for the rest of the decade, but it's worth making an exception for Elizabeth Strout's Lucy By The Sea

There is an insistent generosity in Strout's books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their construction

Lucy By the Sea is another Barton installment that confronts the deep and familiar tangles of intimate relationships . . . Through this complex and isolating time, Lucy plumbs the nuances of human connection

Poised and moving . . . It is only in the steady hands of Strout, whose prose has an uncanny, plainspoken elegance, that you will want to relive those early months of wiping down groceries and social isolation . . . This is a slim, beautifully controlled book that bursts with emotion

After giving a beloved secondary character from her 2016 bestseller I Am Lucy Barton his own standalone with last year's Oh William!, Strout returns to the source, packing her recently widowed heroine off to Maine from Manhattan during lockdown - and exploring, in her clean inimitable prose, no less than love, loneliness, and what it means to be alive

Heartwarming as well as somber . . . Strout's new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame - and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America . . . Strout's understanding of the human condition is capacious

Strout writes in a conversational voice, evoking those early weeks and months of the pandemic with immediacy and candor. These halting rhythms resonate . . . Rendered in Strout's graceful, deceptively light prose

Intense and disturbing

A beautiful and thoughtfully written novel

Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality.... channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac... Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment's primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence.

It's deftly crafted, packs an emotional punch, and Powers's urgent environmental message, delivered by the Greta Thunberg-like Robin, comes through loud and clear

Powers is extremely good at creating a very specific emotion in the reader: a potent mix of sadness and guilt. He's also a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds

Bewilderment is a compelling story about love in a dying world

Powers succeeds in engaging both head and heart. And through its central story of bereavement, this novel of parenting and the environment becomes a multifaceted exploration of mortality

It is a thoughtful exploration of individual grief, a study in empathy for the biosphere, a questioning of the medical profession's pathologising of children and a beginner's guide to eco-biology... Bewilderment is both cerebral and heartfelt, a rigorous and damning assessment of the state of the world today. A call to arms for empathy and action

Utterly absorbing

One of our most lavishly gifted writers

Nothing less than brilliant

It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book

With its first few pages, Powers' novel completely captivated us and with its last, it bowled us over. Powers creates a texture and specificity to our future that feels simultaneously sweepingly large and breathtakingly intimate, told through the most relatable point of view: the ferocious love of a parent for his child and his struggle to provide him a better tomorrow.

On The Overstory: It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.

On The Overstory: Really, just one of the best novels, period

On The Overstory: Monumental . . . breath-taking . . . a gigantic fable of genuine truths

On The Overstory: Exhilarating . . . on almost every page you will find sentences that combine precision and vision

On The Overstory: The best book I've read in ten years. A remarkable piece of literature

On The Overstory: An extraordinary novel . . . an astonishing performance . . . he is incredibly good at turning science into poetry

The success of the story - and a success it is - comes not from the ingenious scientific speculations, nor the shrewd literary connections (on the "emotional telepathy" of a work of art, or Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon), but the human story between father and son, as Theo finds out 'how my brain learns to resemble what it loves

Richard Powers's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is both brutal and heartwarming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, quietly building to an inevitable and devastating close

He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent

In Bewilderment, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist has crafted a story of great beauty and power