These are stories in the easiest and most pleasurable sense of the word. MacLaverty's work is in a line from Chekhov, via Frank O'Connor

I have not read anything as good for a long time

Eleven exquisite examples of the genre... MacLaverty writes with consumamte skill... This is a book to cherish and one to read and re-read with pleasure in the skilful craft of its composition

MacLaverty is an exhilarating, tender, humorous wirter... who can set a scene and create a character with Chekhovian delicacy and economy... He reminds us that although life is a dangerous, painful business, we should never despair

This stupendous new book - crucial, shattering sentences - that express, modestly, monumentally the achievement of this extraordinary writer. He is in behind your eyes before you feel his thinking knife ...Matters of Life and Death is a great book. The explicit presiding literary presence is Chekhov. Not reached nor striven for, innate, rather

This most enticing of writers is also one of the most penetrating

His insights into the female mind are unique

A masterly control of pace and structure, pitch-perfect capturing of voice, characterisation that has spot on credibility, human pleasure in life's satisfactions shadowed by awareness of the ways in which they can be jeopardised

MacLaverty has never written more powerfully or with greater authorial grip

This is a fine collection of short stories, sometimes brutal and shocking, but written with a sort of underground tenderness

MacLaverty's stories don't lack drama, but their effect is subtle and stealthy: they creep up on you

A master at work...richly textured, filled with vividly humorous detail

Confirms MacLaverty's status as an impressive heir of Chekhov and James Joyce

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