The tea ceremony becomes a tiny stage on which grand passions are enacted... Avery captures all this with the emotional poise befitting her characters, and great sensual pleasure. Her novel is a rather beautiful thing: all the more so for emulating the values of another world

Should appeal to fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day

In Ellis Avery's The Teahouse Fire, aesthetic rules vie with politics, sex and human feeling. Avery has whipped up a heady brew of sex and human feeling

Vivid and engrossing... Although this is a historical novel as well as a coming-of-age book, the depth of Avery's exploration of her period and her characters lets her soar above the limitations of both genres...[it is] a novel that, like the tea ceremony itself, provides true pleasure to the intellect and all the senses

Avery's writing is saturated with color and detail; she manages to make 19th-century Japan both accessible and exotic

A rich story, to be savoured for its detail rather than its plot

The Teahouse Fire is a novel as exquisitely intricate and carefully presented as the tea ceremonies it depicts. It is a masterful act, and a most captivating portrait of a changing society. A book to savour

With meticulous detail and exquisite sensuality, Avery invites us into a lost world on the brink of transformation. The Teahouse Fire is an absolute spellbinder

Fans of historical fiction, as well as those with an appetite for all things Japanese, should consider Ellis Avery's The Teahouse Fire... This brims with intricate details about Japanese culture: the ways of the samurai, the different castes, the role of women

Wodehouse is so utterly, properly, simply funny

I've recorded all the Jeeves books, and I can tell you this: it's like singing Mozart. The perfection of the phrasing is a physical pleasure. I doubt if any writer in the English language has more perfect music

Wodehouse was quite simply the Bee's Knees. And then some

I constantly find myself drooling with admiration at the sublime way Wodehouse plays with the English language

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

The greatest comic writer ever

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

Sublime comic genius

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour