Her character drawing is perfection, and her sense of fun too subtle to permit quotation

Chipper is the word: Gibbons's heroines are plucky, determined and quietly hedonistic. But she can do melancholy with the best of them, too, not to mention melodrama

Stella Gibbons…an exception to that old canard: women can't make us laugh

The Jane Austen of the 20th century

Stella is stellar

Stella Gibbons’s gift is very special

A beautiful, atmospheric novel sustained by Murakami's flair for philosophical mediation at its most human

A wise and beautiful book.

A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.

Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction.

Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.

His most deeply moving novel.

Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.

A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.

Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.