Illness, regret, recovery, loss: it's our times in another key. We watch as ordinary lives take an extraordinary turn — the flu felling some and sparing others, and laying bare their emotional lives as it goes

Maxwell does something all great novelists do: he conjures depths of pain and regret in words of radiant simplicity

As you read They Came Like Swallows, you catch yourself from time to time being astonished at how tightly you're gripping the pages… There isn't a word that has dated. It could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow

A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic… Will melt many a reader to tears

As the voices of Austen, Turgenev and Tolstoy have survived, so will Maxwell's

This characteristically gentle story about a family tragedy lingers long in the memory as does all this master's work

An excellent introduction to his sympathetic, refined and humane art, and is a most moving and impressive artefact in itself

A lovely, heartbreaking book

Rare...exquisite...a cameo-like perfection

Compelling, heart-wrenching and laced with redemptive hope . . . Touching and funny

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

Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in

Lovely

Moving and intelligent

Magnetic, unpretentious and bursting with one-liners

Jewell's readability and emotional intelligence make her the cream of pop fiction

Fans of chick-lit will understand when I say that this is a book you simply disappear into