Boyd shows why he's so often compared to Graham Greene.... brilliant and bewitching collection of stories

Like stealing badges, like shucking oysters, once you have one of these stories you can't stop. Lights out was after midnight

Clever and, yes, cinematic

The stories, as is often the case with Boyd, are packed with characters whose lives are upended by random upheavals

Unfailingly amusing and clever

In a 2008 essay, Boyd explained that writing short stories gives him a welcome chance "to change habits, to experiment, to take risks, to try out different voices". And in the best stories here, it's a chance he takes full advantage of, serving up an impressive variety of settings and protagonists

Highly entertaining

Boyd is dependably a master of what's most true: an always elegant realist whose characters will get under your skin

No one charts the highs and lows of the human condition like Boyd

A riveting short story collection from one of the best

Varied, entertaining

Spiky, sparking and simply brilliant

Enjoyably spot-on

What Boyd does so mesmerisingly...is make the insignificant utterly significant...you are confronted by the full force of Boyd's undeniable talent for storytelling, as he inventively plays with time and form, and infuses his prose with themes of lust, love and emotional incompetence

William Boyd is arguably one of Britain's finest living writers...compelling and highly entertaining

He is a skilled and humorous storyteller, and his pleasure in exploring life's uncertainties is apparent

Boyd delights in themes of deceit and getting one over on the competition...such finely-honed prose

Quite brilliant. There has been no decline in the wit, the style, the precise observation

These stories, by one of Britain's most compelling authors about how the post is inescapable - from random encounters to impulsive acts - is funny and surprising

Boyd has always been eloquent, his narratives memorably stylish

Smart, funny and compelling

A collection showing all her trademark qualities of pin-sharp observation and arresting expression.

Spare, slightly chilly… Most of these 10 stories deliver cool shocks, but all are buoyed by an undercurrent of wry humour and pleasingly mellow irony.

The stories in Tessa Hadley’s Bad Dreams…quivered with similar suppressed emotion, whether about grown-up sisters silently feuding, or a neglected schoolgirl whose longing for “life” sees her fall in with a bunch of predatory university students.

A novelist at the top of her game.

Brilliant evocations of female frustration… The disappointments and misunderstandings cut deep. Hadley evokes time, place and emotion superbly well; she’s a great storyteller.

Superb.

She deserves all the prizes. Hadley is psychologically acute, drily witty and absolutely wonderful on place. Her relative obscurity, then, is an unfathomable mystery . . . The female characters at the heart of her novels – clever, impulsive, not always wholly likable – are so finely drawn, I can never get them out of my head

[A] masterclass in writing about the edges of everyday life. This collection of short stories that all link to the Sunshine State captures loneliness, alienation, abandonment and inner resourcefulness in the most creative of tales.

Fantastical tales ... You'll be swept up in a wild hurricane of a ride with this lyrical stories of fury and love, loss and hope.

Each story is perfectly formed, exquisite, often troubling but there is something so brilliantly humane about her work.

The five darkly comic stories that comprise The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are befitting final testaments to [Johnson’s] wild originality... His sentences, like his plots, are full of gorgeous little shocks.