Here they come again, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, skipping along their quantum string of planets like giddy schoolboys - and what a joy it is to have them back . . . it's a thrilling and ceaselessly entertaining ride.

Imaginative, sense-of-wonder SF at its best . . . thrilling stuff from the masters.

Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age... Welsh’s [language is an] astonishingly supple invention: one that can combine scabrousness and lyricism, comedy and ruefulness in the same paragraph... [if] you fancy an authentic and often thrilling blast of full-strength Irvine Welsh, then you’re in for a treat.

It's a stern reader who wouldn't fall for his filthy charm.

Whether your interest is piqued by the ridiculously expensive bottles of whiskey and the extraordinary lengths an American will go to own them or your heart strings are pulled by Wee Jonty’s anguished love story, there’s a multitude of ideas and human emotions that Welsh brings out among the laughter.

When the humour works, we can enjoy the novel for what Welsh clearly intended it to be — a luridly exuberant caper, a series of glossy and gritty snapshots. It won’t make converts out of detractors, but then one senses that a novelist like him wouldn’t want it any other way.

Welsh’s ingenuity, flair, sharp observation, and satirical talent make this not just a decent ride for the reader but an exhilarating one.

It’s filthy and hilarious in equal measure.

An unashamedly indecent read. Welsh fans will love it.

Fantastically funny and well drawn.

Few can match Welsh's verve for spinning a yarn, for putting you inside the minds of characters that are by turn grotesque, joyful, hilarious and – crucially – utterly compelling.

A Decent Ride, while his most comedic novel, is also his darkest.

More furious, filthy brilliance from Welsh.

Packed with filthy charm and characters old and new, it was a comic triumph with plenty of depth through its exploitation of celebrity culture and the treatment of sex workers.

Welsh carries realism to its limits and sometimes beyond… [He] Creates a world more real than a great many worlds we enter in today’s fiction.

She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense

Smith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own . . . How to be both reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a trance

Utterly contemporary and vividly historical

Smith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challenging

One of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully

A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a jeu d'esprit about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist.

A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels

Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappoint

Brilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

A unique conversation between past and present

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh