A marvellous debut by any standards... Beautifully done

Witty, hard-edged and mouth-watering. A tightly crafted, vibrant book filled with the romance and hardships of family life, violence, music and butter

Rich and compelling. Warm social comedy, period detail and perceptive psychology... Kurlansky writes from the heart and taste-buds

Whimsical. Kurlansky's powers of description and humour are abundantly engaging... [An] impassioned, nostalgic, charmingly written novel

Exuberant...hilarious. Recipes for some of the mouth-watering dishes mentioned in the book provide a satisfactorily eccentric coda to an original New York novel

Just dive in and mind the chocolate

'Very enjoyable...Evans writes with tremendous verve and dash. Her ear for dialogue is superb, and she has wit and sharp perception...A consistently readable book filled with likeable characters: a study of loss that has great heart and humour'

'A serious and accomplished first novel, an affecting study of togetherness and separation in a family, a marriage and, most importantly, between the twins'

'An exciting and vibrant read. It's a weird and wonderful fairy-tale about the lives of twins...26a is brilliant and a great read'

'Poetic, complex and lingering'

'Highly coloured, linguistically inventive...Evans has a powerful and often beguiling imagination'

'Sensual and poetic, as well as powerful and uncompromising...A mature, compelling and beautiful first novel'

'The writing is both mature and freshly perceptive, creating not only a warmly funny novel of a Neasden childhood - with its engaging minutiae of flapjacks and icepops, lip gloss and daisy hairclips - but a haunting account of the loss of innocence and mental disintegration.'