It is a breathless journey and the closest thing to a real pirate adventure without an eye patch and a time machine... It is a unique work of genius

There are few novels which grip so thrillingly as those first read in childhood, and for me none which has quite matched the excitement of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

Who can think of a pirate without conjuring up the image of Long John Silver?

So what makes these different to any other set of classics? In a moment of inspiration Random House had the bright idea of actually asking Key stage 2 children what extra ingredients they could add to make children want to read. And does it work? Well, put it this way...my 13-year-old daughter announced that she had to read a book over the summer holiday and, without any prompting, spotted The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas...and proceeded to read it! Now, if you knew my 13-year-old daughter, you would realise that this is quite remarkable. She reads texts, blogs and tags by the thousand - but this is the first book she has read since going to high school, so all hail Vintage Classics!

Thubron weaves a skilful, poignant story of love and loss, and also reinvents the myth of the Fall-This novel is above all celebratory. It trumpets the right to walk out on the high wire, to love dangerously and hopelessly - even if death (real or metaphorical) is the price

Freudenberger, a deliciously precise and perceptive writer, loosely based Amina on a woman she met on an airplane, and when she describes Amina's recognition 'that the permanent part of your own experience' is largely an illusion, we can only be glad they struck up what must have been a helluva conversation

Dazzling

A delight, one of the easiest book recommendations of the year . . . Freudenberger knows Amina as well as Jane Austen knows Emma, and despite its globe-spanning set changes, The Newlyweds offers a reading experience redolent of Janeite charms: gentle touches of social satire, subtly drawn characters and dialogue that expresses far more than its polite surface

With her penetrating understanding of and respect for her subjects, both foreign and domestic, [Freudenberger is] an international writer of stature for the twenty-first century

Exceptional...here is an honest depiction of life as most people actually live it: Americans and Asians, Christians and Muslims, liberals and conservatives. Freudenberger writes with a cultural fluency that is remarkable and a prose that is clean, intelligent, and very witty

There is an incandescent talent at work here

Remarkable...a truly prodigious talent

Prose as warm and refreshing as a Californian morning

Genuinely moving . . . Freudenberger demonstrates her assurance as a novelist and her knowledge of the complicated arithmetic of familial love, and the mathematics of romantic passion

Like Lahiri, Franzen and Eugenides, Freudenberger excels at chronicling her characters' emotional lives and world views

It's really, really good . . . A luscious and intelligent novel that will stick with you

Captivating