Written with all Trollope's customary skill and panache, this is an absorbing look at the modern military wife who no longer automatically follows the drum

Nobody understands the snags and frustrations of family life better than Joanna Trollope. She also captures the dangerous pressure points in relationships, the steady build-up of tension, the exact moment when the family fur might really start to fly

Trollope is on top form, hitting the zeitgeist with this perceptive and compassionate inside story of an army marriage

The Soldier's Wife is a cracking read and has clearly been thoroughly researched. All the little details which animate a novel ring true... compassionate, humourous and topical

Trollope is always immensely readable, managing to depict characters' inner turmoil with deft, artful simplicity. Here, she brings her emotionally acute eye to bear on army life

With her stories about the tensions of middle-class families, Trollope consistently picks women's-page issues. In The Soldier's Wife, she continues to explore the power balance in relationships and whether it's possible to be happy if we subjugate our desires to someone else

First-rate storytelling

A thoughtful, even challenging, writer

As always, Joanna Trollope sucks you into the story; as always, she pins people's emotions with deft details.

How would Socrates get on in 21st century Britain? This is the question at the heart of Samantha Harvey's ambitious second novel

The beauty of the intense plot lies in its economy. The novel is so finely tuned, it is hard to find any passage where she is not fully in control. No matter how dramatic the events she describes, they never drown the ideas being discussed.

Harvey's talent is in the details of both characters and relationships that seem trivial but are telling ... Harvey is a master of language, adept at both Wildean one-liners ... and more profound expression

In this Socrates-like story Samantha Harvey examines a dramatic sibling relationship whilst questioning the place of philosophy in modern life

Lovely observations on a sibling relationship

Graceful and full of sharp observation and moments of understated pathos

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide

A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating

Provocative, funny and original

A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness

An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds

A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture

[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being

Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of

Playful, funny... absolutely true

Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations

Amusing and original