A camp clever tour de force… an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Brilliant… the quintessence of Ackroyd

A book full of rich and sudden moments of delight

Harking back to Dickens... London is a major character in the novel. In Ackroyd's accomplished hands the city becomes a mystical place, where visions abound. Highly recommended.

* Cultural pick of the week *

Ackroyd is that timeless figure, a man of letters, dipped in ink, apparently versatile in a breathtaking variety of genres

London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, from bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs

Suffused with Ackroyd’s intelligence and learning

Ackroyd’s pen portraits of the intersecting worlds of academia, literary London and Fleet Street are written with relish

An amalgam of social satire and noirish thriller...vintage Ackroyd

Consistently intriguing

Superb... [Ackroyd] makes the familiar deliciously mysterious

In a slender novel, London's great fictional mapper Peter Ackroyd has woven together a rich spread of tales of the city

Ackroyd writes about the capital, from Camden to Chelsea, like no-one else and he captures the sense of the sixties perfectly, with high-society and low-life London so dangerously close to each other. Full of twists and turns, this is Ackroyd's most exciting novel to date

A classic Ackroyd tale that will not fail to please

With its distinctive language, structure and narrative approach, Lenin's Kisses presents a distictive version of 'rural china' and 'revolutionary China', even while establishing a new literary 'native China'

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

Sophie Hannah is a real star.

Sophie Hannah has quickly established herself as a doyenne of the 'home horror' school of psychological tension, taking domestic situations and wringing from them dark, gothic thrills.

Hannah is a master of intense psychological thrillers . . . Full of twists and turns, and terrifying, too.

She grips from start to finish - a grip which held me against my will because the sustained atmosphere of mild hysteria is hard to take . . . I couldn't put it down.

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

Playful and paranoid New York noir

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it