Here is a book that does the impossible: it combines Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Little Miss Sunshine. Good novels entertain; great ones come as a gift to the readers who are lucky enough to find them. This book is a treasure

Larsen has made an impressive mark ... spectacularly funny

Reif Larsen's wonderful original debut, destined to please readers of all ages, is the Next Big Thing... echoes of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover and Nicholson Baker... a lively sophisticated narrative that looks to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A wilfully original and diverting book ... you can see exactly why it caused publishers to sit up. It is charming and kooky

Think Tom Sawyer with a passion for empirical science... one of the most original books of the year

Fantastical, funny and delightfully original

Impossible to put down. Engagingly poignant and charmingly quirky ... Larsen is an accomplished writer, but he's also a hugely gifted illustrator ... It's a genius debut.

Reif Larsen's debut novel combines meticulous eccentricity with an amazingly broad appeal ... the book is a thing of beauty in itself... TS's voice - and scientific pencil - enchant the reader ... TS's journey - towards forgiveness, understanding, adulthood, love - is a familiar one, but the views are spectacular.

We believe in Spivet because Larsen gives us so much that is elegant and even pretty to look at. The book is beautifully produced with drawings and maps, yet the account of the train journey in this attractively naïve voice would be admirable even if it were not framed and accompanied by sketches

It has the makings of a cult classic...a deliciously ambitious book, a confident blast of ideas - and a beautiful object

Highly entertaining journey...Larsen will go on great things

Something very special...pure genius

a mind-bending journey into the strange world of Spivet [...] Magical

the real star of the show is Reif Larson, a first time American novelist...Some of the sly coming-of-age humour is reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, but it is also very much a modern novel

An endearing and original coming-of-age story

A wilfully original and diverting book, full of carefully penned ephemera.

The tale of map-obsessed outcast TS Spivet is captivating but it's the intricate illustrations - from the temperamental family toaster to the trajectory of his father's whiskey sips - that make this a rewardingly unique read.

Larsen's achievement is to have created a quirky, engaging, painfully vulnerable hero - not to mention a book that's truly lovely to look at, heavily illustrated throughout with examples of T.S.'s prize-winning maps and charts.

Larsen's debut is engaging... plenty of intelligent perceptions, and a generous smattering of Spivet's drawings

The Selected Works of TS Spivet is a joy; a colourful feast of a book... few [books are] as bold as refreshing as Reif Larsen's debut... The account of [Spivet's] adventure is engrossing and full of allusions to classic American literature... There's a lovely hand-crafted quality to the book, and even in paperback form it is a beautiful object

You know it ends in death, and so do Malouf's haunted protagonists, but this telling, at once unfussy and wonderfully poetic, breathes warm life into a great epic

Breathtaking skill...an extraordinary emotional charge.

A finely honed, writerly and wise revisiting of one of the most famous episodes in The Iliad, when Priam the King of Troy goes to bring home the body of his dead son Hector. No-one in prose has managed to better Malouf's imaginative recreation of the Homeric world.

a potent new yarn... Beautifully written in simple language freighted with meaning, Ransom explores a king's impulse to act as a mourning father.