A seamless blend of historical fact and fiction...Foulds's writing has a poetic intensity and his descriptions of the autumnal woods around the asylum are as piercingly keen as his insight into the minds of the patients, the doctor and his family

Adam Foulds won the 2008 Costa Poetry Award, and he is a skilful poet. These talents are well displayed in his prose which, while lyrical, never grows fussy or highfalutin'. He draws a walk-on character with a few deft strokes

A work of strikingly beautiful, unforced writing

The chief pleasure of the book is its prose: exquisite yet measured, precise, attentive to the world

Fould's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic - the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach

Intensely pleasurable to read, studded as it is with electrically acute images and phrases

Foulds wisely resists the temptation to turn Clare into an idiot savant, lunacy as the flip side of genius. The horror of a disintegrating mind is also subtly conveyed through fractured internal monologue

Foulds was fast becoming the pin-up boy of contemporary poets...this beautifully described second novel suggests he's equally a master of prose

A profoundly imagined historical novel, with a gripping plot and some memorably beautiful scenes

This imaginative, atmospheric period novel has style and a host of characters

It takes courage to write a novel about two of Britain's best-know poets - John Clare and Alfred Lord Tennyson - and their encounter in an Epping Forest asylum. It takes skill to turn that into an engrossing, beautiful novel. Foulds has shown both

Rich in its understanding and representation of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between

Every character, every narrative strand is stunningly written, making it an engrossing and unusual historical novel

The world he evokes is conjured up with remarkable intensity and economy of means

The novel is most notable for its savage descriptions of rural life

Foulds does a marvellous job of evoking the atmosphere of the forest. His prose has none of the awkwardness one often encounters when real-life characters are brought into play

With its unflinching look at treatments of madness, and its authentic period feel, this is an appropriately disturbing, while also beautifully written, story of human endeavour - and human failure.

Chosen in The New Yorker Books of the year 2010: 'An intricate homage to two nineteenth-century poets'.

Blake Morrison's examination of the dark heart of male rivalry makes foe a gripping read

Pacy and gripping...wonderfully atmospheric

Morrison's compelling study of male competitiveness offers a discomforting account of the amoral excuses and self-deception of the compulsive gambler: "I don't have a problem. I could stop tomorrow"; "gambling is the basis of our whole economy". You reckon you could put it down at any point - though you'd be kidding yourself

The Bank Holiday weekend from hell is the subject of Blake Morrison's entertaining new novel - a dark little tale about middle-class rivalry and midsummer meltdown. With an ear attuned to metropolitan pretension - modern parenting skills are sent up with gusto - Morrison succeeds in weaving a murderous melodrama that is grounded in the most recognizable of human impulses and desires

A tense chamber piece about a twisted friendship...the author's skilful choreography of unsympathetic characters and a menacing tone make for a sharply intelligent novel that is both unnerving and enjoyable

The Last Weekend isn't really a thriller though its well-paced, tight and gripping narrative has you reaching for the same adjectives that you would use to describe one

For those holidaying with old friends…the book tells the chilling story ofa rivalrousfriendship…leaving Alex Clark to conclude that Morrison “keeps the reader constantly intrigued