You are dazzled by the author's intelligence and understanding of human nature

Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared with Proust and rightly so. It is a novel of extraordinary subtlety and pathos. The next thing Marias deserves is the Nobel Prize

He has as gift for the wickedly comic set piece...He seems incapable of writing a thoughtless or throwaway sentence.We need more novelists like Marias

An intriguing and audacious experiment

Tim Parks’s brilliant new comedy is an invigorating twist on the male mid-life crisis novel… A very funny, very clever novel that shows with tremendous verve how life is so often a beleaguering collision between the absurd and the profound.

A frantic and minutely observed comedy of family, marriage, life and death. There is something in the synaptic twitch of Parks’s prose that brings us closer to the pressures and rhythms of a lived life than the work of any other contemporary writer I can think of

Blazingly funny, full of squirmy physical comedy and weaselly shilly-shallying

In Extremis is a novel about death and family and religious faith, about fidelity and infidelity… It is intelligent, comic, sad and at times disturbing… Parks has a remarkable talent for presenting the waywardness of thought… Good fiction makes you think and feel at the same time. This novel does that very well, at times comically, at times distressingly.

A tense, believable black comedy

Beyond the fierce and questioning intelligence are both humour and artfully constructed and invariably gripping plots

This is what a novel should be - gutsy, moving, funny, tragic, true – and with a syntax to die for. Tim Parks is in a league of his own. He makes every other English author of his generation look lame. In Extremis, in exacting detail, depicts the naked truth of marriage and aging, sex and death, family. Brilliant, brutal and all too quick – like life.

A master of emotional complexity

In Extremis is simply spellbinding and quite unique in my reading experience; very funny and very existential, compact and chatty, complicated and raw. Parks has written a masterpiece.

A thrillingly unsentimental—thrilling because unsentimental—meditation on every aspect and orifice of the human body.

Parks writes with wit and intelligence

A writer of considerable intelligence and great technical skill...tremendously readable

An exceptionally acute observer of modern life

In Extremis is by turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking. Structured with subtle intricacy, superbly controlled, and emotionally intelligent, this is a book to love

The Parks remains one of Britain’s most seriously under-celebrated novelists… In Extremis is often hilarious… The humour, clever asides, effortless plotting, astute characterisation, sense of everyday chaos and compelling readability will come as no surprise to his seasoned readers, yet the telling achievement of what is his finest book to date lies in its unexpected tenderness and beauty… Intuitive and humane, funny and sad – as real as life and death, as is Thomas Sanders, warts and all. This likely Man Booker contender is a British novel possessed of a sophisticated European resonance

The dreamlike quality of the stories in Men Without Women is undoubtedly one of its chief attractions… Murakami’s womenless men live in perpetual daydreams, a state of mind often prompted by a loss of some kind… Murakami’s latest is a hypnotising study of male loneliness

Potent storytelling and a generous cast of minor yet memorable characters… make for a helter-skelter read that’s clever, comic and pulsing with humanity

Thematically taut and compulsively paced.

A very good novel of anxiety, embarrassment and also, somehow, the depths of Englishness.

An example of masterful storytelling

With each novel Ryan gets better, and this moving and quietly insistent work is his best yet.

You can sense his compassion in the bones of his work

Devastating and masterful

A hugely affecting, moving read. I was heartbroken by the end, but adored every chapter

Beautiful

Each section displays Ryan’s range as a writer... [he] writes with brilliant empathy.

Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose.

Heartbreaking … Arguably the best of the new wave of Irish writers to have emerged over the last decade

Ryan has the gift of ventriloquism - he inhabits his fictional creations thoroughly, enveloping you in their worlds

Sublime

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan made me laugh and cry and forced me to look strangers in the eye

Beautifully bleak and characterised by his remarkable ability to write about grief and common humanities.

Beautiful, compassionate

Superlatives wouldn’t do for describing From a Low and Quiet Sea … understated, and gloriously heart rendering

Strout turns her clear, incisive gaze on the intricacies and betrayals of small town life

Anything is Possible is predictably great because it's written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable - because it is written by Elizabeth Strout