A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home

Vintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable erudition

A essential novel of our fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980s

His descriptive powers are breathtaking...Pynchon proves once again to be the master of what might be called the highbrow conspiracy thriller

One of the funniest, most cleverly written, superbly characterised and beautifully structured books that I have read by a living author

How this book towers...it is a political novel in the ambitious, exuberant, powerfully serious mode of The Satanic Verses..It is funny, very funny

Brilliantly imagined...Among Stead's many achievements is a convincing social, political and physical backdrop...his creation of a coherent, rival story - clever, moving and sometimes witty, with fully human characters - is nothing short of a revelation

A pleasingly unpredictable mix of traditional and radical... It's clever, thought-provoking

Pynchon can be totally maddening, but he has a great sense of mischief

Clever and inventive in a mad professor kind of way...Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry

A fast elasticism running from slangy to stately, a voice full of echoes, littered with jokes and songs, and often reaching into a curious tenderness, a tone of laid back elegy.... this amazing writer continues to be amazing, and in much the same way he always was

‘[Toni Morrison’s] irreverence was godly’

A beautiful book and it's beautifully written

My favourite book of all time

Morrison's stunning trilogy is an evocation of black life over the past four centuries. It defies summary. Completed almost 25 years ago, these novels top anything produced by any American writer including Hemingway, Updike and DeLillo

[A] beautiful, haunting novel

More than one of Morrison's books could be classed as masterpieces, but this one is famous for a reason: everyone should read it

A magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece

A triumph

She melds horror and beauty in a story that will disturb the mind forever

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature

A work of genuine force. . .Beautifully written

There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you

Superb. . .A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . .Exquisitely told

This is a wonderful novel about slavery, freedom, parental loss and revenants