One of the most interesting and critically underrated novelists we have... The Folklore of Discworld - co-authored with the eminent folklorist Jacqueline Simpson - emphasises his irreverence and drollery

Pratchett is, like Mark Twain, or Jonathan Swift, not just a great writer but also an original thinker... funny, exciting, lighthearted and, like all the best comedy, very serious

Simpson provides depth to the real-world analogues of the Discworold characters, and the text becomes a neatly integrated discussion of folklore, belief systems and the like in both worlds... well written and will raise a smile... a fine Hogswatch present.

When a particular kind of story, heavily based in one culture, gets transferred into a culture distinctly different, something magical happens. Something modern, new and distinctly creepy... The magic is rooted in the realities of modern Russia. Inventive, sardonic, and imbued with a surprising the sense that, for this author and his audience, much of this stuff is new-minted.

The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail

Nor is The Kindly Ones only a great work of history and reflection, but full of striking literary writing: consummate adagios of landscape painting; lovely images and observations...even touches of macabre humour...inescapably impressive

Its account of Nazi cruelty, chaos and callousness has never been surpassed in fiction... Unforgettable...magnificent

The force and cool detachment with which author Jonathan Littell describes the physical realities of war and mass murder are searing. He has spent years on his research and clings closely to the historical record but this fictional presentation brings the accounts horrifically alive

[It] provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil... the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction

It's a compelling and provocative novel

The Kindly Ones has been hailed as the return of the great European realistic novel.

I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell's much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it...a magnificent achievement

An immense novel...The depth of detail is astounding and authentic

A masterpiece

An extremely disturbing novel

A remarkable and controversial novel

Jonathan Littell veers between brilliance and bathos...

Grotesque, dismaying, chilling in its focus on the fine detail of barbarism, this epic of evil is also addictively readable

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned