A real find

Extraordinary

Ridiculously gripping straight from the start

Will thrill and delight ... a terrifically well-observed, haunting and occasionally harrowing read

This is an uplifting, exciting and often humorous yarn about camaraderie, endurance and redemption. Throughout, Walker nicely evokes the agony and exhilaration of distance running.

... what sets this novel apart is Walker's extraordinary emotional articulacy

A page-turning thriller with a pace as relentless as the characters' feet hitting the pavement. A deft look into the mind of a man who needs the near-destruction of the world to show him what truly matters

Brilliant ... superb to the end

A really fun, engaging, exciting, and compassionate take on a familiar scenario: the apocalypse ... Highly recommended

Compulsively readable

A compelling read

a book that you won’t ever want to reach the final page of. All good things must come to an end but Walker’s tale of courage and fortitude will linger on

This is a wonderful book. The author brings an almost cozy domesticity to the end of the world, as his protagonist struggles to come to terms with what it means to be a husband and a father as the world falls apart around him. The central journey is a glorious roar of defiance against the brutality of a broken world and a shattered society, woven together with a lament for things lost and things left undone and unsaid. Adrian Walker breaks your heart in unexpected ways, and leaves you with a sense of stories still to be told. An end-of-the-world tale that is anything but an ending

A fresh and frighteningly real take on what "the end" might be . . . quite an exciting and nerve-wracking ‘run’, with characters you believe in and feel for.

Creepy and disturbing right from the start.

A disturbing but brilliant narrative . . . a rare treat.

A pitch perfect novel, fond and atmospheric. It reads as if Gill Hornby was born to write Cassandra’s story, and she brings her whole witty and sympathetic self to the task.

Utterly absorbing. The lives of the Austen sisters are recreated with a brilliant sureness of touch that can only be achieved by deep study of the period.

Gill Hornby weaves a magnificent work of the imagination, a pastiche of Regency style and manners, fabricating a solution to a problem that has long mystified scholar . . . Hornby’s portrayals of Cassandra and Jane are tantalising . . . All devotees of Austen’s novels will want to join Hornby, and Cassandra, in this enjoyable act of piety to Jane.

Austen aficionados have looked askance at Cassandra’s wilful destruction of her famous sibling’s letters, but here, in a tender and touching recreation of their relationship, the (imagined) correspondence is the key that unlocks the plot... Hornby deftly describes the psychological toll that such uncertainly took on Jane, and movingly celebrates the fortitude of Cassandra whose greatest love was her sister.

A wonderfully original, emotionally complex novel that delves into why Cassandra burned a treasure trove of letters written by her sister, Jane Austen – an act of destruction that has troubled academics for centuries.

A beguilingly persuasive book that no Austen fan will want to miss.

A beautifully wrought drama that find Cassandra, now an elderly spinster, looking back on the life they shared. Utterly charming.

Fans will delight in this new novelby Gill Hornby, which ingeniouslyimagines what Jane’s sister Cassandra Austen’s own life might have been like.

This complex story reveals a clever and warm-hearted character in Cassandra, and brings us closer to one of the greatest of all English writers.

A novel that will delight Pride and Prejudice fans.

This is an engaging story about love, loss, and finding one's place in the world. A must-read for Jane Austen fans.

Through her spry, witty portrait of Jane Austen’s sister, Hornby mounts a lively defence of single women’s liberty.

Fans of Pride and Prejudice and Emma will enjoy this touching story[…] In her meticulously researchedthird novel, Gill Hornby skilfully imagines the correspondence between the sisters.

Hornby does amazingly well in the riskiest area of all, the invention of letters ostensibly written by Jane […] The television rights to this novel were sold at birth. No surprise: the dialogue is ready to roll […] People are going to love it, but I wonder if any screen adaptation will be able to convey the hidden treasure within this thoughtful story.

‘It won’t surprise me if this is one of the books of the year, it’s a delight, one of those that you don’t want to end.’

Many of the themes familiar from Austen’s novels are deftly revisited by Hornby, and the letters that are reimagined are pitch-perfect, with deeply touching confidences shared in family correspondences. You can tell this book by its cover – it’s quite lovely.

Beautiful novel[…] light hearted historical fiction which resembles Austen’s novels, a really lovely read very suitable for incoming spring’

Gill Hornby unfolds it all in her imagination.

Hornby combines a moving portrait of sisterly devotion with a comic depiction of the provincial life so brilliantly evoked in Austen's own novels

[A]t the heart of it all there's a romantic twist..."Hornby is at her best describing the complex bonds between the excellent women of her story. She describes the horrors, but also the pleasures of spinsterhood"

I've just started reading Anne Enright's Actress. I very much enjoyed her previous novel, The Green Road. This one has glorious lines even in the opening pages.

I would definitely recommend Actress by Anne Enright, it is her at her very best.

Few reviews said how absolutely hilarious [Actress] is. Enright skewers beautifully those creepy provincial aesthetes of Dublin of the sixties and seventies.

Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness. Here she conjures [a] rollicking story.

A rich, impressively imagined work about a stage and screen star who may never have existed but seems considerably more human than many real-life figures as seen through their own eyes or those of any but the finest biographers.

This story is about mothers and daughters, but also secrets in families and women in Ireland. It's an easy read, with a quintessentially Irish tone... It's brilliant.

Anne Enright's brilliant novel is a darkly glittering account of the cost to both the mother and her daughter of Katherine's complicated fame.

A gem from a former Booker winner.

Anne Enright['s]...writing is simply glorious. Comedy and tragedy in one.