Jacobson is a great storyteller: phrases, anecdotes and atmosphere roll off the page with the ease and sublime, scary grace of drunken eels...he is unsurpassable

This mature novel has the sustained exuberance and passion of his youthful writing...an achingly funny book...an amazing acheivement... There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry

Marvellous. Jacobson has not just written the first great novel about ping-pong. He has written one of the greatest sporting novels ever...a towering work of authority

Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade...comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh

A skilful, plot-twisting balance of humour and heartbreak.

An impressively sustained, and unusually intense, literary experiment

He is a master of the comedy of social awkwardness... Jacobson is playing a sophisticated literary game, in this most literate of novels

Mesmerising...also as delightfully funny a novel as one would expect from Jacobson, who revels in language and in the perverse spell it can cast... The Act of Love is spellbinding, not just in its characterisation, or in its simplicity of plot, in the flirtatiousness with which Jacobson courts language, or the stylish sardonic humour that seems to come so easily, but in its entirety

The Act of Love, like Jacobson's other work, contains a rich vein of humour...Intelligent and erudite, Felix is a fascinating character

Jacobson's page-turning account of sexual obsession is replete with erudite flourishes and sophisticated insight

One of the author's most affecting, honest and brilliant works. It is a searingly well written piece by a ridiculously underrated novelist

Entertaining... Jacobson's prose is incisive and off-kilter, abrasive and often hilarious

Felix Quinn, the narrator of the book...explains it beautifully - and this is a very good novel... Feeling unsafe makes him feel alive. And loss, of course, is the wellspring of good storytelling

The Act of Love is an ambitious and at times extremely uncomfortable novel

It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it?

This is a very good novel

Jacobson's 10th novel is a moving, thought-provoking and darkly witty story of desire and love

Trollope explores, with infinite delicacy, the strands that make a family

An absorbing contemporary novel from one of our most perceptive writers

Trollope has created a fount of bitchy tension which she manipulates with great skill