The music, folk inspired, brings depth and resonance, hooking the narrative into a wider perspective, of generations unnamed who have fought and died

The modern horror novel owes an enormous debt to Poe, and the novel of psychological horror owes him almost everything

If you love thrillers, you have to read these stories

Poe's work as a whole is a series of haunting improvisations on themes from the macabre that are hard to categorise, dazzlingly original and posthumously influential on an extraordinary range of writers from Baudelaire and RL Stevenson to Yeats, Wilde and Borges

A comic riot of a novel.

Worst. Person. Ever. succeeds by virtue of its verbal energy, the brio of its invention, the snappiness with which successive gags and ever more appalling atrocities are piled on.

Coupland has penned a bitterly funny tale of our time and created one of the grossest characters to deliver it.

Worst. Person. Ever., challenges the present-day with excess, satire, and biting critique

Sathnam Sanghera’s entertaining story is a “remix” of Arnold Bennett’s classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale … Playful wit infuses the novel … But behind the humour and the plot twists, is an important novel that explores an often overlooked part of this country's history … That the story of the Victorian mercantile class told in Bennett’s novel is so easily transposed onto the community Sanghera grew up in nearly a century later is absolutely fascinating, and by recognizing and exploiting this with excellent effect, he examines the nationwide story of British immigration through the prism of the Punjabi Sikh experience.

A funny and touching read ... Brilliant … A superbly updated version of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. At its heart, this is a simple story of family … yet, all this is handled throughout with the lightest of touches, so that on reaching the end, you want to begin again to pick up the subtle nuances of this book

It is very good and has many of the qualities found in Bennett’s masterpiece: acute observation of society and societal change, thoroughly imagined and well depicted characters, mastery of naturalistic detail, and generosity of tone. It is very enjoyable … It does what the novel can still do better than any other art-form: showing you that other people think and act in a manner very different from your own, but one which is equally valid … It is [a novel] which celebrates that most necessary of qualities, kindness … It is acute about human frailty, but also understanding of this. It is often funny and its great merit is its humanity. It’s worthy homage to Arnold Bennett.

Marriage Material is a comic feast, full of delectable matter. It does what only the best comic fiction can do: it robes important social subjects in laughter. Then, too, by the end, I felt I knew Sathnam Sanghera’s characters intimately and felt so warmly about them, I didn’t want them to go: no mean feat, given that I’ve never been into a Wolverhampton corner shop, either in Enoch Powell's scurrilous heyday or more recently. This is a splendid debut.

Marriage Material is a wonderfully engaging book, full of heart and wit. Its exploration of what it means to feel torn is rich and subtle. Its characters stay with you. Its jokes make you laugh in the night.

It will take virtually no pages for you to be hooked

Sanghera’s Marriage Material has humour [and] cultural relevance…Anyone who’s grown up as a second generation immigrant can relate to the themes seen here … I’d heartily recommend Marriage Material to anyone who needs a little push to reconnect to where they’ve come from, be it Copenhagen or Punjab.

Sanghera’s story captures a time of extraordinary changes in Wolverhampton […] Discrimination, mixed-race marriages and the changing face of Britain appear in both Sanghera’s timelines. As the novel progresses, the stories collide and there are startling revelations, humour and mystery. It is smartly crafted, weaving in droll observations about immigrant life and the defensiveness of south Asians living away from home, while also providing a thoughtful commentary on the casual racism of Britain, the tedium of always being out of place and the complexities of belonging in an increasingly heterogeneous world.

Sanghera ... tells a larger story about the big political and economic struggles of the past half-century. He examines changing attitudes to immigration, the rise of big-box stores and the hollowing out of Britain’s industrial centres ... Sanghera, who grew up in Wolverhampton himself, does a good job of capturing the complications of progress.

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

Playful and paranoid New York noir

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it