The amazing untold story of Victoria before she was Queen ... Kate Williams reveals a passionate young woman beloved of her future subjects but at war with her family

Passionate, exuberant and entertaining, a treasure trove of royalty, intrigue and politics ... vividly and sensitively brings to life the girl who would become Queen

This fresh and vivid portrayal of the young Queen Victoria is deserving of the highest praise. I cannot recommend it highly enough

Becoming Queen showcases an outstanding talent from whom we can expect much more

History as exciting and tempestuous as you are ever likely to find

A dashing and vivid account of Charlotte and Victoria's lives

Examining the death of Princess Charlotte, and Victoria's own struggle for power, this is a bracing recreation

Detailed and sympathetic

An illuminating biography

After Edward Said's masterpiece Orientalism, From the Ruins of Empire offers another bracing view of the history of the modern world. Pankaj Mishra [is] a brilliant author of wide learning ... skillful and captivating narration

Pankaj Mishra has produced a riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. He follows the intellectual trail of this contested history with both intelligence and moral clarity. In the end we realise that what we are holding in our hands is not only a deeply entertaining and deeply humane book, but a balance sheet of the nature and mentality of colonisation

Highly readable and illuminating ... Mishra's analysis of Muslim reactions is particularly topical

Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia

Sophisticated ... not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra's keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction

Outstanding ... Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative ... The insights afforded by this book are too many to be enumerated ... Mishra performs a signal service to the future - by making us read the past in a fresh light

[Full of] complexity and nuance

Subtle, erudite and entertaining

Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia

A vital, nuanced argument ... prodigious

Hilary Mantel, a rival for the Women's Prize, once said that Atkinson "delivers to the populace its jokes and its tragedies as efficiently as Dickens once delivered his, though Atkinson has a game-plan more sophisticated than Dickens's". This is Atkinson's best book to date, and she is as worthy as Mantel for the Prize.

She never ducks the sorrows of loss and human cruelty but an optimistic exuberance keeps coming through...This is, without doubt, Atkinson's best novel since her prizewinning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum...A ferociously clever writer...a big, bold novel that is enthralling, entertaining and experimental...I would be astonished if it does not carry off at least one major prize.

Atkinson packs a huge emotional punch...As with Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, she explores the kaleidoscopic paradoxes of 'what if'.

Life After Life would be very good even if it was simply about the troubles of an early 20th century family and followed a less ambitious, more linear path. Yet it is more than that: a novel that makes you think deeply about the forks of your own life, the truth about dreams and deja vu and the grander scheme of time itself.

Highly readable...her description of the Blitz is a tour de force.

Her very best...a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination...exceptionally captivating.

Electric..very special indeed...extraordinary...tangible and vivid...The paths are endless, but each so affecting that we long to keep this character alive and moving forward.

No writer alive makes for better company on the page—knowing, funny, and prodigally inventive… ..Literary and entertaining all at once, Atkinson is a sophisticated artist who also can keep you up well past bedtime, and that double-barreled talent is on display as never before in Life After Life.

Possibly Atkinson's biggest triumph

Atkinson imbues her family saga with a fluid sense of time and a vivid sense of history at its most human level. A dizzying and dazzling tour de force.

Eccentric and daring...incredibly inventive, and her tricks with time,space and reality are dazzling.

Brilliant...Frequently heartbreakingand entirely thrilling.

Marvellous...spellbindingly done.

There are a few books that are so enjoyable that you slow down when you’re reading them, trying to delay the inevitable moment of completion…a voice that is both idiosyncratic and wise, one that sees the world in a distinctive, dark, but oddly consoling way….One of the remarkable things about Life After Life is the way that formal experimentation is combined with a consistently involving plot…Atkinson’s name is conspicuously absent from the Man Booker longlist. I find myself wondering whether Austen would make the lists if she were alive today.

This is great

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.