Perenially fascinating... When Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent he was responding imaginatively to a real botched bomb attack on Greenwich, at a time when there was real panic about anarchist extremism throughout Europe

An astonishing book

This damp, dark thriller dances about on satirical feet, from its opening paragraph to the very last, where it suddenly plunges like Chernobyl's core to our own apocalyptic times, seamed with petit-bourgeois envy and crazed fundamentalist dreams. Whether attacking the former or the latter, Conrad never lets go of his grim, twitchy smile.

One of the two unquestionable classics of the first order that [Conrad] added to the English novel

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