The best fantasy trilogy of the decade.

Lev Grossman has conjured a rare creature: a trilogy that simply gets better and better as it goes along... Literary perfection.

Lev Grossman's novel is full of magic ... stupendous urban fantasy ... The Magician King is Harry Potter for grown-ups who have learned to hate Harry Potter

The most entertaining and compelling fantasy I've read in a long time.

A story about extraordinary deeds, heroism, magic and love -- all the stuff that makes escapism go. It's a fantastic trick that makes this into a book that entertains and disturbs at the same time

Fabulous fantasy spiked with bitter adult wisdom-not to be missed.

An excellent follow-up to a brilliant first installment.

Grossman's trademark eloquent-yet-hip writing style flourishes in this sequel, a creative and entertaining novel well worth the wait

Grossman's psychologically complex characters and grim reckoning with tragic sacrifice far surpass anything in C.S. Lewis' pat Christian allegory. Fabulous fantasy spiked with bitter adult wisdom-not to be missed.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians was my favorite novel of 2009 by a landslide, cleverly combining aspects of classic fantasy with modern literature and pop culture. Grossman's trademark eloquent-yet-hip writing style flourishes in this sequel, a creative and entertaining novel well worth the wait

Somewhere between Juster's Phantom Tollbooth and Narnia, as told by Philip Roth ... The Magician King is at once an existential exercise that angrily shakes escapism by its shoulders and demands that life have a purpose, and a story about extraordinary deeds, heroism, magic and love. It's a fantastic trick that makes this into a book that entertains and disturbs at the same time

As a reader, you close the book with a profound sense of how ideology has permeated and changed very sector of collective human life, from trivial daily matters to the great ruptures of history

A powerful satire on ideology, veering between the grotesque and the horrific

I would absolutely recommend this to individual readers and reading groups alike. It’s not an easy read considering the subject matter but it is a very good one.

An eerie, compelling novel, its deceptively simple language is a 'slight rush of words' which hold much more than they seem capable of containing...This novel is about the need to create a story we can live with when the real story cannot be told...

Strout uses a different voice herself in this novel: a spare simple one, elegiac in tone that sometimes brings to mind Joan Didion's

This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it

An exquisitely written story...a brutally honest, absorbing and emotive read

Honest, intimate and ultimately unforgettable

Sympathetic, subtle and sometimes shocking

Plain and beautiful...Strout writes with an extraordinary tenderness and restraint

One of this year's best novels: an intense, beautiful book about a mother and a daughter, and the difficulty and ambivalence of family life

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz

Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is the best novel I've read for some time

An exquisite novel of careful words and vibrating silences

In this quiet, well observed novel, a mother and her mysteriously ill daughter rebuild their relationship in a New York hospital room. Deft and tender, it lingers in the mind

A worthy follow-up to Olive Kitteridge

I loved My Name is Lucy Barton: she gets better with each book

The standout novel of the year - a visceral account of the relations between mother and daughter and the unreliability of memory

In a brilliant year for fiction, I've admired the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly