It's a rare achievement for the magic of childhood to be treated so weightily

When the Israeli writer David Grossman's See Under: Love was published...he was compared legitimately to Kafka, Grass, Márquez and Joyce....David Grossman's own intimate grammar will speak to anyone who was ever twelve

It is an achievement that is full of charm and courage

Like [Virginia] Woolf, Grossman is uncanny at reproducing an experience from the inside out...the writing reminds you of the great, solemn mystery of literature, what the poet Czeslaw Milosz calls 'the human possibility of being someone else

Mr. Grossman's balance between the poetic and the profane is perfect....[The Book of Intimate Grammar] is See Under: Love's stylistic twin: the beauty and intelligence of the writing are dazzling....It can be read at once, as a tale of magic realism, a parable about the damage left in the wake of the Holocaust, a psychological portrait of a child's descent into madness, and, finally, as a comical but searing indictment of the Jewish family

Ms Hilyard's wit, along with her polish, send a promising signal for the future.

Cleverly deploying all the conventions of non-fiction.

As Hildyard's story unfolds, the lives of ordinary parents, grandparents and great-grandparents become as pertinent, captivating and touching as any official history of England could be.

Makes for interesting reading.

An ambitious, almost impossibly wide-ranging book... Where the novel is most original is in tone. If a good writer is someone who matches style to subject, this novel is very prosing indeed.

Hunters in the Snow is a very assured assemblage held together by the questions of narrative, integration, and preservation which run through it.

Ambitious debut novel.

Like history itself, the meaning may remain doubtful; but we relish captivating stories.

Fine and wonderfully original debut novel.

A hauntingly brilliant first novel about how we respond to the past... I envied, as well as admired, this author's literary command. A star is born.

One of the year’s most impressive first novels…Hunters in the Snow’s ambition, scope and assurance…are thrilling and admirable, and make for a very fine book indeed.

Wonderfully lyrical… Ambitious and moving

extraordinary first novel... a 21st-century War and Peace

Both heart wrenching and uplifting, a stunning, intricately plotted, brilliantly written, tour-de-force of a novel that burns into the memory

Mr Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully... its ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is one of the most accomplished and affecting books I've read in a very long time.

At the start of Marra's ambitious first novel, set in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War, eight year-old Havaa escapes the Russian soldiers that are carting off her father and flees a home set alight. Marra then plunges into a complex, beautifully crafted series of events, full of secrets and elegant moments, all wreathed in a frozen world.

Some novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel. Taking place in war-ravaged Chechnya across a decade, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a stunning debut, following a timid but determined country doctor and the girl he rescues once her father is arrested and presumably killed. Marra elegantly slides across time and perspective, mastering an omniscient voice that reveals each character’s future, present, and past, all in acrobatic sentences that leap through time.

A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles… Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly… I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book

Marra is a brisk and able story-teller, and he moves deftly between a number of characters who are drawn into contact by the war… The writing is vivid throughout

Original, insightful