Pam Ayres is absolutely essential to British humour, reminding us all to be tickled by the small joys and ridiculousness of everyday life.

My prescription for Christmas jollity would be Pam’s book passed around by the family

An overtly political novel attacking McCarthyism and Watergate

After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame

A gruesome and darkly comic insight into the life of a ASB Officer. Think Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt but with more dead bodies (and not just human ones) and an abundance of cat shit. It's a gloriously cynical read but it's also sympathetic and deeply empathetic. Being an ASB Officer comes across as one of those "rotten but somebody's got to do it jobs" and I was glad that in these cases, that that somebody was the author.

Stories of tragedy and comedy from the social housing frontline . . . Shocking . . . Laugh-out-loud funny. The delivery is punchy and the humour dark - think Irvine Welsh minus the Scottish vernacular . . . The reader is taken from pathos to snort-inducing comedy and back again in just two sentences

A funny, thoughtful look into one of the toughest jobs I can imagine.

A fascinating man with a fascinating story. Get this book. So dark but also funny and well written . . . It's been a real eyeopener reading this book. Poignant and empathetic, caring and silly in a few places. In equal parts devastating and dark and incredibly funny.

Brilliant. This deserves to be a huge success - funny, sad and heartbreaking

A riveting and brilliantly written memoir . . . There is a human story on every page to make you cry with sorrow, cry with laughter or curl your toes in horror (often all three at once). The result is a potent cocktail of heartbreak and horror; wickedly funny, wearily endearing and absolutely enraging.

Combining snark with sensitivity, Nick's increasing cynicism and depression add an extra dash of gallows humour to situations which are anything but funny.

[An] enjoyable and valuable read that should generate justified appreciation for public servants trying to sort out some of society's more intractable problems.

A really entertaining read.

It's really interesting . . . Really important

This story of what it's like to do one of the UK's hardest gigs is a witty page-turner on the one hand, a shocking indictment of austerity on the other. Blackly comic, it will make you rage, weep and laugh out loud - sometimes in the space of a paragraph.

This is a wonderful book. Full of heart and humour and the genuine care for people going through a hard time runs through it.

This is a fantastic book. You should buy it immediately.

Extraordinary, fascinating, very moving and very funny

Horrifying, funny, important . . . Really great - an insight into another world, in the same vein as This is Going to Hurt and The Secret Barrister.

Following in the footsteps of Adam Kay and The Secret Barrister, Pettigrew delivers an entertaining and informative account of his career as a much-harassed anti-social behaviour officer. Hilarious and enraging in equal measure, Anti-Social documents a world of obnoxious neighbours and damaged individuals with wit, compassion and righteous anger

A tremendous read. A year in the life of an Anti-Social Behaviour officer. It's bracing stuff, brilliantly written. Thankfully Nick is a funny writer because it's a bitter pill to swallow at times. Highly recommended.

A compelling novel

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

Creepily affecting

Chilling and vivid

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

Intriguing

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller