If all else perish, there will remain a storyteller's world...that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter as well as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, and with a happy and eternal homecoming

Maugham teases out buried secrets as mesmerising as the heat and as menacing as the surrounding jungle

Ideally you should listen to these stories lying in a long cane chair on the veranda of a dark bungalow sipping a gin and bitters - not that Maugham's writing needs any further atmospheric embellishment. Like Kipling and Conrad, Maugham transports us to a long-since-vanished and distinctly non-PC world of hard-drinking colonial planters and traders and their frosty memsahibs

Simpson's gifts are a lyrical vocabulary, an authoritative form, a special funny-sad quality and a subtlety of understanding... Add in political argument, and she is a key voice for our time

It's all packed with Simpson's deadpan wit - she is one of the most sharply funny writers in England today

Helen Simpson can weave more thought and feeling into a thousand words than some achieve in as many pages

The collection as a whole is carefully organised, with the lightest piece butting against the most death-haunted one and a tidy distribution of public and private themes

These stories have been well made and have been carefully fitted together... undeniably classy

A wonderful writer

Inhabits his characters with the seemingly effortless sympathy of the gifted realist writer... Deserves all the honours it is able to accrue: a better book of short stories will not be published this year

a collection whose seemingly ordinary surfaces conceal precipitous depths

A good collection of short stories ought to be as enticing as a gift of fruit or flowers, even if the apple conceals a poison, the rose a canker. Few exponents of the short form offer such tempting, disturbing pleasures as James Lasdun.

Striking collection of humane short stories.

Reading Lasdun is like reading a sly collaboration between Kafka and Updike: elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching.

A sobering study of how humans cope when under pressure. Lasdun's prose is undeniably sound. Ingenious sentences are strung together with ease

Short stories from a master prose miniaturist

A marvellous, masterful collection

Lasdun specialises in capturing, with unnerving insight, the split seconds in which moods and emotions turn on triggers so fine and subtle that they're barely perceptible. He nails these moments perfectly, spiking the core of the microgram of fly in the ointment and thus catching the infinitesimal moment with startling perception

James Lasdun is one of those gifted writers who seems to have avoided the attention he deserves....It's Beginning to Hurt is, in places, the best story collection I have read since Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins.

Lasdun's third collection of short stories is nothing short of a revelation... each story is raised to amazing heights by the author's incredibly incisive prose

James Lasdun, poet, novelist, short story writer and Englishman turned American émigré, offers up permutations of suppressed inner turmoil

There is something so rich and gripping in his prose that it simply elicits your attention... It's Beginning to Hurt is a collection to jump-start your imagination

A master of the form with the enthralling psychological subtleties

Precisely observed and chilling

Lasdun is a smart writer with an excellent sense of pace

Lasdun's prose is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness

Lasdun bravely identifies a profoundly anti-human aspect to environmental moralising to provide a study in embarrassment that made this reader wince

Superb... punchy, exhilarating collection

Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight

Lasdun's characters from New York and the Sussex countryside create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive, marked by the thoughtful, and humane exactness of his prose