Sharp, funny, engaging...de Bernieres is doing for Colombia's drug culture what Tom Sharpe did for apartheid. His approach is flippant, but the purpose behind it is deadly serious

Vibrant, lucid, charged with wild jokes and harrowing scenes smelted with torture...a book which shudders with memorability...satirical and splendid

It's a delightfully mesmerising book. Set in a mythical South American country that's a composite of real South American history and Bernières's fertile imagination, and therefore a perfect companion to take on a south-of-the-border vacation - the book is awash in the realities and flavour of South America and the lunacies of Bernières's genius

Amusing, terrifying and ultimately sobering

Erudite, funny and disarming, this is a love story for grown-ups, with an ending that, by simultaneously defying and fulfilling the reader's romantic expectations, manages to be entirely satisfying.

Truong's pen is a scalpel, laying perfect words down along that nerve until even the happiest reader understands what it means to forever stand apart from your family and the larger society you inhabit...The novel's end is neither bitter nor sweet, but the perfect combination of both

If you liked The Shaking Woman by Siri Hustvedt, you'll love Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong... a tale of friendship, loyalty, love, family, and above all, the mysteries that make us who we are

With a heroine who literally eats words, Truong is amply aware of the power of them... she wields her narrative like a quarterstaff, knocking readers' expectations right out from under them

Monique Truong creates a world so subtle, mysterious, moving and sensory that it heightens our consciousness of those qualities in our own. Bitter in the Mouth is the rare novel that makes one life story unique and universal at the same time

Be prepared for a full range of tastes of life in Bitter in the Mouth: friendship, loyalty, love, family, and above all, the mysteries at every corner of one's history that make us who we are. Monique Truong is a great observer and a beautiful writer

A terrific writer... She's changed my perception on life

A classic of contemporary Americana... variously funny and horrifying and finally, quietly, terribly moving

A book that should join those few that every literate person will have to read

A novelist who knows what a proper story is . . . [Tyler is] not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well

In her ninth novel she has arrived at a new level of power