The author's narrative flows as easily as Father tiber . . . A grandly meaty historical novel . . . rich with gracefully integrated research and thundering to the beat of marching roman legions

Brilliant... A Cruel Madness brings to mind other novels set in the microcosmic world of a hospital, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

With terrifying vividness, Mr Thubron creates a phantasmagoric world

A quietly extraordinary tour de force

Colin Thubron conjures up, within a tight narrative, a whole persuasive world - not just the physical setting of the hospital, but the tortuous and paradoxical internal world of the warped mind

A magical book. It's one of those books that makes you feel as though you have been on an emotional rollercoaster.

Brilliantly empathetic. Believe the hype: a brilliant, heart-warming book

In telling a painful story in the voice of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's, Haddon broadens ordinary minds and helps to understand how they work, too.

Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy

I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out

Original, moving and entertaining for adults as well as for older children

A deservedly acclaimed read.