There are moments in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, amid the flashbacks and shifting points of view, when a kind of magic begins to tug at the surface

Drawing from personal experiences during his own sentencing and exile, Dombrovsky writes passionately and often humorously about the terrifying Soviet judicial system. Fear and chaos pervaded the lives of Russians in 1937, the height of Stalin's purges. During this time, Zybin, an archeologist in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, is wrongly accused of a crime and then forced through the labyrinthine prison system, in which the bureaucratic investigations are even more grueling than the physical punishment he endures. Meanwhile, all those who know him, including his young assistant, Kornilov (many of these characters were introduced in Dombrovsky's The Keeper of Antiquities, his only other novel translated into English), are subjected to long interrogations in which every word can be twisted to incriminate Zybin or even themselves. Theological arguments about justice weave their way throughout the novel, and, as in Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita, these discussions focus primarily on the person most active during Christ's trial?Pontius Pilate. Dombrovsky argues that Pilate was a weak governor, a mere bureaucrat who constantly feared for his position. The interrogators and prosecutors of the novel are allegorical Pilates. The young and frightened Kornilov breaks down and betrays Zybin, who, unlike Christ, is not willing to acquiesce to the system as it stands. Wonderfully written and darkly witty, Dombrovsky's novel, first published in Russia in 1978, draws us into the surreal world of Stalin's Soviet Union.

An imposing fictional portrayal of the Stalinist terror, set in 1937 in the eastern Russian republic of Kazakhstan (on the Chinese border) and featuring themes and characters from Dombrovsky's earlier novel, The Keeper of Antiquities (1969)... Thickly textured, eloquently argued, as informative as it is dramatic: a superb novel that brings to our attention an important near-contemporary (Dombrovsky died in 1978) whose books belong on the same shelf with those of Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn

'The great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody ... who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences'

'Persistently amusing, good-hearted and shrewd'

'This has everything to recommend it...one of his most inventive'

'Pratchett's most intriguing yet'

Using the language of the scriptures, Markovits depicts religion’s potential for both beauty and cruelty, and the inevitability of transgression even in the most devout life

The writing is stunning, the execution flawless and the plot utterly gripping (4 stars)

An unusual, beautifully written novel

As well as an intriguing literary and metaphysical puzzle, the book is also one of profound and painful humanity, preoccupied with some of the most essential questions about what it means to be a parent and what happens when noble principles are confronted with the grubby details of everyday life

It's a relief after reading a lot of contemporary fiction to come across the sober prose of Coetzee. He doesn't shout at you... He knows what he's doing... The whole novel is a kind of escape act, an elaborate rope trick... magical

This is a book to make you think. This is a book to forcefully turn you away from mindless entertainment and set you on a journey inwards, where you ask yourself the important questions in life. It's philosophy as fiction... Part of his achievement is down to how fit for purpose his prose is. It is remarkably sparse and yet feels dense, weighted with layers and layers of meaning

[A] moving but mysterious story of a lost childhood... Is it possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it's about? Before reading J.M. Coetzee's new novel I might have said no - but now I'm not so sure... [As] disquieting as it is moving... [All] I can say is that ever since I finished it, it's been going round and round inside my head like nothing else I've read in ages

What JM Coetzee writes matters... [A narrative mode] akin to that of Kafka... At once lucid and elusive

Reading JM Coetzee is like swimming in a sea with a calm surface and a savage undertow. His sentences are lean; his subjects menacing: power, race, animal rights and confession

Tormented states of mind, ambivalence and guilt stalk his work, as do the dual influences of Kafka and Beckett

A retelling of the gospels? A fable about Utopian, Chaves-style socialism? Coeztee moves in mysterious, but mesmerising, ways

There are knotty concerns here on reading, on order and chaos, on political engagement, on almost anything you can think of. But, “you think too much,” Elena says to Simón. “This has nothing to do with thinking.”... What Coetzee has given us is a book not of answers but of questions... Coetzee’s prose is clean and efficient, driving the reader on through the mazy stasis of life in Novilla. There is plenty of what, to avoid a cliché, we might call Kafkaish stuff... These qualities, combined with the enjoyable and unaccustomed exercise of thinking about the book – wanting to think about it – all the way through, meant that in a strange sense, The Childhood of Jesus is the most fun I’ve had with a novel in ages

There aren’t many subjects bigger than the question of faith – and with The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee appears to have found a subject worthy of his high-level craftsmanship

An intellectual adventure

A perversely comic, intellectually profound and obscurely allegorical novel

With elegant ease, Jones spins a good old-fashioned comedy of manners