A real romp of a road novel featuring a talking toad. I can't wait

Publisher's description. A madcap Highland adventure about midlife crises, new friends, and second chances. Douglas Findhorn Elder is fifty years old, recently dumped and suddenly jobless. Mungo Forth Mungo is a talking toad. And as luck would have it, this toad is determined to help his hapless human chum to sort his life out...

Joyful, warm-hearted, funny ... but buried within are serious points about the stories we tell about ourselves, how history shapes our identity, scarred landscapes and self-selecting communities. In heartsore times we need more books like this.

Funny and fun ... To Be Continued manages to be sad and happy at the same time. You can engage with the post-modern games and references if you like, or you can just sit back and laugh, and cry. A Scottish baroque novel, full of tricks and trinkets, written with warmth and wit.

Robertson manages to skilfully join the quirky with the serious; the surreal with the real. His take on contemporary Scotland is insightful, eccentric and highly readable.

To Be Continued, with its harem-scarem scenarios and surreal twists, was written to entertain.

A wildly eccentric tale laced with dry, deprecating wit

Emotional depth and dramatic maturity... Unarguably Foer's most substantial and impressive work yet

Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family.

A brilliantly acrobatic imagination

Provocative . . . very, very funny. Dialogue pings, as animated and inventive as an Aaron Sorkin script.

Terrific, truthful, extremely funny and heartbreaking.

A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives.

Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry. The book that The Corrections ought to have been

Brilliant, masterly, always original

A delightful fish-out-of-water account stitched together with gentle yet wondrous prose

McCloskey is a keen, sympathetic observer; her tight, controlled prose meticulously details Alice's honest consideration of her flaws and desires. The melancholic complexity of Alice's very human struggle carries this elegant novel with no easy answers.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Calibri; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} Humane and lucid ... The real heartbreak in this wise, discomfiting novel turns out to be the love between mother and daughter

McCloskey interrogates the universal need of finding our place in the world in this luminous novel about longing and belonging. ... McCloskey's slim novel has an emotional heft and power that stirs you long after you've closed its pages.

Masterly

McCloskey's prose is lovely and light-filled

Terrific, sharply observed… Segal gets the precarious mother-teenage daughter relationship spot on

Segal’s is a clever, cruel, redemptive, psychologically acute novel that made this reader glad to have been at school just too early for Facebook, selfies and an “online community” baying for news of your latest boyfriend

Thoughtful and beautifully observed

A gripping foray into second families

Thanks to its occasional moments of emotional veracity, The Awkward Age will be praised as a worthy successor to Segal’s debut

Francesca Segal is an accomplished writer. She neatly describes the clash of cultures between the academically rigorous education enjoyed by Nathan and Gwen’s freer, no-holds-barred comprehensive school. There is an engaging and colourful cast of characters… Segal vividly conveys the difficulties faced by imperfectly blended families

This is a warm, funny book dealing with a most modern matter

A brilliant, thoroughly modern family drama from the author of The Innocents

Punchy… Segal tackles her subject with humour and intelligence and a wealth of memorable characters

Exuberant and entertaining… The rest of the narrative then considers how the competing needs and duties of its four main characters can be met, handled and resolved. It does so with brio, insight and empathy, and with carefully modulated comic energy

A compelling story on the complexities that come with a very modern family that we just couldn’t put down

Love, loss, new beginnings and saying goodbye, it's all in here. A moving read

A terrific novel.

[Segal's] descriptions are spare and unerring; everyday family interactions are observed warmly and yet with precision