I would always prefer to go get another Dickens off the shelf than pick up a new book by someone I've not read yet

He's a marvellous writer ... He's very, very good

I love all of Dickens

Coady's achievement here in depicting small-town rumour as an almost elemental force is matched by the complexities of her character-making and by a rare restraint and control

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. Quietly compulsive and finally moving

A heart-stoppingly moving story... Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world's finest novelists

Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around

Norwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author's genius

An intimate and dark story... A beautifully introspective novel that made me feel all the emotions

Murakami must already rank among the world's greatest living novelists

Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility

Vintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels

[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done

Murakami's most famous coming of age novel of love, loss and longing

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed.

[A] treat . . . Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done.

One of the most poignant and evocative novels I have ever read

Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates heartbreak and loss of faith