Editorial reviews

With such simple, yet sprawling, beautiful and hilarious sentences, one can hardly imagine a world where art like this has disintegrated into ashes, radioactive trash heaps or stardust.

The Rosie Project is indeed an excellent, charming, feel-good story.

Maksik displays both realism and hopefulness about human nature without being unrealistic about either.

With A Marker to Measure Drift, though, Alexander Maksik’s deep belief proves warranted: he has succeeded.

“Marker” is a study of scarred consciousness struggling to come to terms with the violence done to it in a moment of cataclysmic horror.

Instructions for a Heatwave is never dull, never unconvincing, proceeding at a stately and crisp speed through a fully rendered world, grappling at all times and in an original way with the fascinating problems of our time, rushing head-long — and yet staggering almost drunkenly when necessary — towards a stirring and wondrous conclusion.

Ms. Kent aligns Agnes's hypnotic storytelling with the island's oral tradition. She uses passages from the 13th-century Laxdaela Saga, about a murderous love triangle, while delivering her parallel tale of seduction and betrayal.

Kent’s immersion in Icelandic lore seems total, though she came from the other side of the world. Great stories are universal.

First Novel is either far too clever for its own good, or far too good to be a debut. Which, of course, it isn't.

A sulphurous portrayal of masculine frailty as well as a sly poke at the caprice of literary fame, it’s hugely impressive and entertaining.

Much as it plays with notions of narrative and authorial identity, in its meticulous depiction of the landscapes of South Manchester it seems to be mapping a state of mind as much as a city.

A fresh, moving portrait of religion as it could and should be. The cliffhanging finale offers hope that we will see more of Cynthia’s odyssey in future books.

It’s a wonderful depiction of life inside the mind of a real, complicated and scared woman in the grips of a harrowing addiction, and it’s a page-turner from start to finish.

Don't be afraid to give this book a try, especially if you're a Dickens fan!

Harrison calls this book a collection of novellas, and the pieces remain as they were originally published. Yet I have to wonder if, with significant cuts — though not to Hemingway’s level of restraint — these installments from Brown Dog’s life could have been reworked into a rip-roaring great read.

Half the Kingdom is more harrowing than hilarious, and too short and sketchy to be a compelling addition to a now familiar geriatric genre.

Donna Tartt is catnip for educated people who want to read entertaining but not difficult things about lofty topics and cosmopolitan people.

The reader can only recognize that this Catherine Havisham deserves more than either Dickens or Frame allows her.

It’s a piercing, painful story with a surging humanity beneath it, and similar things could be said about all the stories and the novella that constitute this book.

In her homage to Dickens, Tartt never fully channels the Victorian’s gothic strangeness, and she loses some of her own vicious variety.