She was a pioneer, multi-tasking mother... Gaskell's work will always be one of the adornments of liberal Britain

My dear Scheherazade...I am sure your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one

Her stories are wonderfully funny, but the ridiculous is bathed in a poignant, dreamlike mood found nowhere else in fiction, and profound ideas and strong values sleep beneath everyday details of bonnets and cakes

People who read her always come away surprised at how modern she sounds. You don't have to think yourself into her century in order to sympathise, since her guiding principle was no more or less than a sense of practical, day-today justice, totally outside the abiding gentleman-lady-peasant-donkey-peasant's wife hierarchy which surrounded her

Pah! to Dickens. Eat your heart out, Little Nell. That Elizabeth Gaskell could write a death scene to make your socks melt

A writer of great power and subtlety, a specialist chronicler of depression... alcohol addiction, yearning and loss

Every sentence of Kennedy's fluid prose is to be savoured... An unflinching book, elevated by the sublime quality of Kennedy's writing. Lacerating comedy is pitted against passages of sheer beauty

Kennedy's lyrical evocation of the mind of an alcoholic draws on, and slyly subverts, a long distinguished tradition of hard-drinking narratives in Scottish literature, from Alasdair Gray to Irvine Welsh

In Paradise, A.L Kennedy weaves her word magic around one woman's determined embrace of alcohol

A stylist of the highest order

Gripping... Stylistically consummate

Arnaldur Indridason has built an international reputation with this series, and rightly so. Hypothermia is perhaps his best book yet, gracefully depicting the lengths to which people are driven by the need for answers. An outstanding novel

The Icelandic master of crime Arnaldur Indridason is not yet as well known in this country as Sweden's Henning Mankell, but on this showing, it is only a matter of time...a wonderfully atmospheric tale

This is a humane, unsentimental study of grief and guilt, which is both moving and unsettling. It's also a softly gripping narrative, without ever resorting to fight scenes, car chases or torture

Margaret Atwood is a wry and perceptive observer of society as well as an original storyteller

Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first century America gives full rein to Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit and astute perception

This is a novel pervaded by violence, sex, terror, but also by contemplation, analysis and – occasionally – by hope… Atwood shockingly reveals what we could be capable of.

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