Maugham had a narrow but profound gift for domesticating the strange and making the exotic appear reassuringly familiar

The fictional summa of everything Maugham had seen and learned about the East

The modern writer who has influenced me the most

He puts most 21st-century novelists to shame

I Curse the River of Time is a work of blackest tragicomedy, a novel as cold and scintillating and desolate as the northern winter landscapes that are its setting.

Per Petterson stands unsurpassed among contemporary writers for existential truth telling

He unpacks the folly and pain of the human condition, leaving space for wit

My new literary heartthrob is the Norwegian writer Per Petterson...his latest book...returns to a favourite character, Arvid Jansen, and follows his struggles to resolve his relationship with his dying mother, whose disappointment in her son strips him bare.

Shows Petterson's alter ego, Arvid Jansen, confronting his mother's terminal cancer, and recreates his indigent, often alienated youth in East Oslo with charitable humour.

This subtly unnerving tale raise goose bumps as the tension builds towards the menacing finale

Chapman deftly ratchets up the tension, pitting off-kilter emotions against a sense psychological doom as the novel builds to an unsettling conclusion

These tightly compressed short stories are deft portraits of people under extreme pressure, delivered with a surreal perspective that oddly serves to compound their power...her writing is superb: almost every word in this flinty, almost unbearably sad collection matters

It's a testament to her talent and her humanity that these broken lives are life-affirming in the way that only good art can be

Kennedy is attuned to the shock of separation, as well as the pain ... Kennedy is adept at different types of stories

A virtuoso of prose

A L Kennedy's short stories are rare pearls, all seductive surface and dark depths

What admirable richness and complexity

Kennedy has such control over her material that it never overwhelms the reader or becomes showily gothic

There's no denying that these utterly controlled stories have a power, humanity, and even beauty of their own

While What Becomes is not always an easy book to read, Kennedy's linguistic inventiveness, wild humour and compassion make it an unexpectedly joyful one

Twelve stories from the manic mistress of comically vitriolic observation

Savour this book

Kennedy specialises in acute observations of thought... In this collection of short stories, she inhabits unhappy couples, lonely shopkeepers and strangers in hotel rooms to searing, painful and comic effect

A virtuoso performance...This is a collection of stories that will be re-reading exceptionally well, like an album of brilliant songs you keep wanting to hear again

Funny and furious, Kennedy's tales of floundering marriages and domestic disappointment follow an anarchic path of their own

Kennedy's superlative work always attracts admiration