Flawless... such mastery of narrative, imagery and feeling, the prerequisites for great prose

It seems such simple and straightforward language, but it isn't. The first chapter of A Farewell to Arms is only two and a bit pages but there is almost every variety of sentence structure. It is incredibly artful writing, and part of the art is disguising that it is artful

There is something so complete in Mr. Hemingway's achievement in A Farewell to Arms that one is left speculating as to whether another novel will follow in this manner, and whether it does not complete both a period and a phase...crisply natural and convincing

A novel of great power

Essential Hemingway...a gripping account of the life of an American volunteer in the Italian army and a poignant love story

This is a great love story

One of the finest novels of the last forty years

This is literature at its very best: a book with the power to reveal the unimagined, so that one's life is set in a changed context. I urge you to read it

So powerful is this recreated past that you long to call Birdsong perfect

A powerful novel that is difficult to put down

My favourite novel of all time because it’s not just the most moving First World War story, it also has a wonderful romance

It broke my heart.

Magnificent. A classic that everyone should have read.

A sweeping historical drama, it’s also erotic, poignant and tear-inducing. I read it and wept buckets. I don’t think anything else Faulks has written before or since surpasses the brilliance of this one.

This is literature at its very best. A book with the power to reveal the unimagined, so that one’s life is set in a changed context. I urge you to read it.

While marked by poppy wearing and memorial ceremonies, the First World War is also sustained through family history, handed down from one generation to the next. No book better articulates the impact of this narrative than Stephen Faulks’ Birdsong.

A truly amazing read

I’d never read such descriptive literature, and couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about what I’d just read. His [Faulks] portrayal of terror on the battlefield is so powerful

My all-time favourite book

No living novelist dramatizes artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín, or conveys so well the entanglement of imagination and desire . . . Reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer

This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world - with all its wonders, tragedies and sacrifices. I loved every page of this beautiful and immersive journey into The Magician's mind

Toibin's symphonic and moving novel humanizes [Mann] . . . Maximalist in scope but intimate in feeling

Mr. Tóibín wields a dramatically stripped-down prose style . . . epiphanies, when they come, are all the more powerful after so much restraint . . . What Mr. Tóibín's exquisitely sensitive novel gets right, in a way that biography rarely does, is its acknowledgement of unknowability

A haunting and heartrendingly intimate portrait of its protagonist, the German writer Thomas Mann, and a richly drawn sense of place . . . [a] vast and stunningly realized world . . . you'll find yourself savouring every page

An incisive and witty novel that shows what good company the Nobelist and his family might have been

It's a work of huge imaginative sympathy . . . quite thrilling . . . it takes a writer of Tóibín's calibre to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be transmogrified, turned into art

The hallmarks of Tóibín's diaphanous prose - stillness, precision, intimacy- remain intact despite the wideranging, voluminous material of Mann's biography . . . in a quietly epic tale, Tóibín expertly captures the layers of a richly multiple self and surely reasserts his own status as one of our greatest living novelists

Wonderful . . . a very accomplished and enjoyable novel

Simultaneously intimate and transnational . . . this is deeply engaging, serious and beautiful writing that carries its echoing questions with grace

Compelling . . . Superb characterisation and sharp insights throughout make this an immensely enjoyable novel

Intelligent and enthralling

The Magician, Colm Tóibín's new novel about Mann, resists the shallow gestures of Hollywood biopics, reaching for something mainstream film couldn't get at, or wouldn't bother with. How does an artist create, and can a true artist live as the rest of us do?

This meticulously woven novel re-creates the life of Thomas Mann . . . An ode to a 20th-century genius and a feat of literary sorcery in its own right

The personal and public history is compelling . . . an intriguing view of a writer who well deserves another turn on the literary stage

[The Magician] vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself

This vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself

Compelling . . . Tóibín succeeds in conveying his fascination with the Magician, as his children called him, who could make sexual secrets vanish beneath a rich surface life of family and uncommon art . . . intriguing

Employing luxurious prose that quietly evokes the tortured soul behind these literary masterpieces, Tóibín has an unequalled gift for mapping the interior of genius

Literary lovers will want to sink into this absorbing reimagining of the life of the Nobel Prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann . . . Mann family members have their own struggles - with each other and a world where they rarely feel at home - all vividly brought to life

You don't have to be a Thomas Mann fan to be gripped by the account of his life that author Colm Tóibín delivers in his new novel . . . [Tóibín's] his biggest triumph is in getting to the heart of Mann's dilemma

A celebration of what novels can do

Devastatingly human . . . savage, sordid and hauntingly believable

Tremendous, richly beautiful, wonderful . . . it does everything we ought to ask of a great novel

Subtle and enthralling

A sweeping saga that alternates between the life of a tenacious female aviator in the 1930s and that of a millennial film star cast to play her in a biopic. In death, 'each of us destroys the world,' the author observes - but her engrossing novel is a moving reflection on the will to survive

Artfully constructed and exhuberantly entertaining

Shipstead soars in this expansive, beautiful novel about women and flight

Engrossing, ambitious, beautifully written

Completely engrossing from the very first page. You won't be able to put this down

A brilliant saga of a book. It will absolutely captivate you