The cheerful poverty of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol, is a sure-fire tear-jerker. At one public reading by Dickens in Boston, there were "so many pocket handkerchiefs it looked as if a snowstorm had gotten into the hall"

It has it all: a spooky ghost story, a heartwarming redemption and a great plot with a satisfyingly happy ending

A story which, perhaps more than any other, sums up the spirit of the British Christmas

One of the great achievements of British culture

But that story endures and retains the power to move us because it speaks to the human heart, and gives us hope when hope is fading

A little masterpiece...irresistible

After 150 years still have the power to fascinate readers

Beautifully written and this re-designed cover is stunning

I'm a huge fan. Wodehouse writes proper jokes.

To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language.

One jaw-droppingly powerful, courageous and original fiction debut...As a 10th work of fiction this would be impressive; as a debut, it is remarkable

Hands down the best fictional debut we have read this year

For the imagery alone and for the sentences, the book would be a treasure, but the story it tells - the story of the suicide of the author's father - has an immediacy and sharpness made all the more special by the tone of distance in the narrative and the beauty of the writing

David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is brave, fantastically well written, and completely defies categorisation

From the shores of Vann's Alaska one can see the Russia of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons ... 'A father, after all,' Vann writes, 'is a lot for a thing to be.' A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With Legend of a Suicide David Vann proves himself a fine example of both

...a gripping fantasy thriller that will please all the older Harry Potter fans out there

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