Arch and playful... [Yan Lianke] deploys offbeat humour, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history... A brave, brilliant novel

It’s a Chinese novel hailed across the planet as a masterpiece, and I’m normally the first to resist such an imposition before I’ve even opened the thing – but for once, the hype doesn’t go far enough... a devastating, brilliant slice of living history

No other writer in today's China has so consistently explored, dissected and mocked the past six and a half decades of Chinese communist rule... it is an extraordinary novel

One of the masters of modern Chinese literature

Stark, powerful and compelling... A privilege

A searing, allegorical view of Chinese society during some of the darkest moments of the Mao era. . . . Yan cements his reputation as one of China's most important—and certainly most fearless—living writers

Yan's new work is vital historical testimony

A biting satire about Chinese re-education camps during the Great Leap Forward that's as haunting as it is eye-opening

One of the masters of modern Chinese literature, Yan Lianke gives all the pleasures one gets from reading. He can extract humour from the bleakest situation. I whole-heartedly recommend this latest book

A rich reading experience and much light shed on this catastrophic period of Chinese history

Woven together, these “texts” reflect the catastrophe of the times and meditate on the meaning of integrity, truth, love and ethics when confronted with horror. It is an extraordinary novel

As a reader, you close the book with a profound sense of how ideology has permeated and changed very sector of collective human life, from trivial daily matters to the great ruptures of history

A powerful satire on ideology, veering between the grotesque and the horrific

I would absolutely recommend this to individual readers and reading groups alike. It’s not an easy read considering the subject matter but it is a very good one.

An eerie, compelling novel, its deceptively simple language is a 'slight rush of words' which hold much more than they seem capable of containing...This novel is about the need to create a story we can live with when the real story cannot be told...

Strout uses a different voice herself in this novel: a spare simple one, elegiac in tone that sometimes brings to mind Joan Didion's

This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it

An exquisitely written story...a brutally honest, absorbing and emotive read

Honest, intimate and ultimately unforgettable

Sympathetic, subtle and sometimes shocking

Plain and beautiful...Strout writes with an extraordinary tenderness and restraint

One of this year's best novels: an intense, beautiful book about a mother and a daughter, and the difficulty and ambivalence of family life

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz

Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is the best novel I've read for some time

An exquisite novel of careful words and vibrating silences

In this quiet, well observed novel, a mother and her mysteriously ill daughter rebuild their relationship in a New York hospital room. Deft and tender, it lingers in the mind

A worthy follow-up to Olive Kitteridge

I loved My Name is Lucy Barton: she gets better with each book

The standout novel of the year - a visceral account of the relations between mother and daughter and the unreliability of memory

In a brilliant year for fiction, I've admired the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly