Religion, sex and mania bursting hoof-footed from suburban doors

Not since The Catcher in the Rye has there been such a believable portrayal of male puberty. The quality of story-telling and the cadence of the prose have a piercing authenticity

As a technician [Parks] cannot be faulted. His book builds to a terrifying tour de force, made bearable only by the tight prose

He can write, at will, like a modern Henry James, proceeding with composure through the labyrinth

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance