Everyone's happiness project looks different, and I was utterly charmed by Maya Van Wagenen's honest, funny, and thought-provoking account of her efforts to become 'popular'.

Maya Van Waganen's memoir, POPULAR, would have been wonderful to read as a kid, and so reassuring to Nerdy Teenage Me. Her year-long experiment in popularity is timeless; the intelligent and humane way she gets to the heart of the matter is uniquely her. Funny, determined, and wry, Van Wagenan has written a wise, heartfelt guide for other kids eager to keep up.

Geeky and dorky, but never wimpy, Maya Van Wagenen is as powerful and honest as she is quirky and funny-and startlingly gifted. She's the real deal, folks, a teenage John Green for the next generation. Stunning.

A talented writer, she's funny, thoughtful and self-effacing . . . Teens will readily identify with her

Popular is wonderful. It is charming, touching, entertaining - and brought back a lot of memories about my own high school anxieties. I will be saving my copy to give to my daughter when she is a little older

Geek-smart prose and wry humour . . . hilarious

Genuine, funny, tragic and never dull. It'll also leave you flossing with a vengeance

It's a pleasure watching this young writer confidently range from the registers of broad punchline comedy to genuine spiritual depth . . . There's a happy side effect to reading the novel, as well: If you're a backslider like I was, it will guilt you into flossing again

An engrossing and hilariously bleak novel about a dentist being shook out of his comfortable atheism . . . This splintering of the self hasn't been performed in fiction so neatly since Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock'

Ferris [is] a Virgil of the disaffected . . . This is the novel's peculiar brilliance, to uncover its existential stakes in the most mundane tasks

Laugh-out-loud hilarious, combining Woody Allen's New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary

Returns Ferris to the comedy of the workplace . . . his writing is so fresh and modern - a comedian's sense of timing mixed with a social critic's knack for shaking the bushes

Funny and surprisingly moving

It is completely wonderful . . . Good god he is talented

Enormously impressive: profoundly and humanely engaged with the mysteries of belief and disbelief . . . dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be

Brilliant . . . witty . . . passages of flashing comedy that sound like a stand-up theologian suffering a nervous breakdown

Joshua Ferris excels at mordantly comic novels about ordinary people in crisis . . . he writes with brio about the modern condition

Compelling but never cheap, inventive but never obscure . . . Ferris has secured his status as exactly the sort of mainstream literary novelist American fiction needs

A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction

Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis

This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique

Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth

A virtuoso piece of entertainment which hurtles satisfyingly towards its conclusion after delivering a startling, didn’t-see-that-coming sucker-punch of a twist.

Funny, moving and thought-provoking

The key to Harkaway’s writing is the incredibly textured depth and imaginative characterisation. It is one of those books whose character are so rich that by the climax, you feel like they’ve penetrated your reality and you want to keep them close, even after the book is over.

Original and exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work

Original, exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work.