It's exactly the sort of bright, hilarious novel you want to read while flopping on a sun-lounger with a chilled spritzer to hand

Sharply observed first novel...light but lethal

As a technician [Parks] cannot be faulted. His book builds to a terrifying tour de force, made bearable only by the tight prose

He can write, at will, like a modern Henry James, proceeding with composure through the labyrinth

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance