A quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid... Silver linings have been hard to find lately, but in Life Without Children Doyle has given us just that

[A] gem of a collection... Roddy Doyle's greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers, but he has lately put his gifts to use in painting a picture of characters in...their "third age".

Quietly devastating... Doyle's clipped, plain dialogue shivers with emotion.

Life Without Children...displays Doyle's remarkable talent for conveying the strongest of emotions in the simplest of words and the shortest of sentences... It bristles with quietly sharp insights into the shape of a human life.

There is an immediacy to the stories in Life Without Children, an emotional charge that comes with writing in real time, and an optimism too. In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection.

Moving...[and] beautiful in its brevity.

A treat for fans of the Booker Prize-winning Irish author... the darkness of the stories, Doyle's lyrical style of wit, passion, and occasional obscene outbursts, shine through... wonderfully uplifting.

As always, Doyle has a great ear for the cadences of Dublin speech, finding humour in even the bleakest situations.

Gripping tales of increasing recent villainy and bias in the laboratory, which should worry those of us who love science

All the replication-failure and scientific-misconduct stories you've ever heard are here - along with more that you haven't ... This comprehensive collection of mishaps, misdeeds and tales of caution is the great strength of Ritchie's offering ... Ritchie's four themes carve complex, interconnected issues at natural joints, and allow his case studies to shine

He has come to praise science, not to bury it; nevertheless, his analyses of science's current ethical ills - fraud, hype, negligence and so on - are devastating

Science Fictions... is a useful account of ten years or more of debate, mostly in specialist circles, about reproducibility

A riveting journey through the story of anatomical alchemy, Spare Parts is a fascinating read filled with adventure, delight and surprise

Spare Parts is such a pleasure to read, filled with so many fascinating characters and stories that seem almost too crazy to be real; I found myself chuckling, shaking my head and yet proud to be a part of this field. This is a must read for anyone that has ever been touched by transplantation or the gift of donation, a book that makes us proud of our macabre past and excited about what can only be a limitless future

Stuffed with eccentric characters and questionable experiments, this is a joyful romp through a fascinating slice of medical history

A perfect blend of history, science and humanity on a thrilling journey around old and new parts of the human body

Spare Parts uncovers the gripping birth of sharing body parts, and significantly, tells us all of our current 'good ideas and innovations' have been thought of and tested already - we are simply adding to the mix. This visceral book offers us an unparalleled historical treatise, as the world of complex transplantation continues to unravel and change

With curious and clinical precision ... Craddock raises questions about how we relate to one another, what stories we choose to privilege and who gets to tell them

By turns delightful and disturbing, even the most seasoned of medical history buffs will be astonished by Spare Parts. A thoroughly engrossing read that I couldn't put down. Hit that order button -- you won't regret it

An accessible and wide-ranging account . . . Amid the toe-curling descriptions of vivisected dogs and doomed trial runs at human-to-human tooth transplants are hopeful and inspiring accounts of how farmers and embroiderers shared their knowledge with medical practitioners . . . Thoroughly researched and appealingly digressive, this fascinating medical and cultural history sheds light on what it means to be human

Amazing facts . . . I highly recommend it.

Maggie Nelson writes with a luminosity that is, upon opening any one of her books, immediately enlivening.

A patient and astringent analysis of what we owe each other and what we owe ourselves, and how to balance the two demands.

Beautiful and shocking, but ultimately so gloriously hopeful. The book we should all read as we emerge from this latest strangeness.

I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family ... Managing to cram the whole modern history of British farming and nature into 270 beautifully written pages, this is a gem that's moving and immensely informative.

A rare and urgent book ... Its beauty is not only in the writing but in what is behind it: a gentle and wise sensibility that is alive to the human love affair with the land and yet also intimately cognisant of our collective and systematic cruelty towards it.

I think, genuinely, this is the best book I've read this year, and one of the most important books of recent years. It is about food and farming, and how we eat what we eat. It's about progress and nostalgia, without being prideful or mawkish, it's about families and tradition, and the passing of time. It made me simultaneously proud to be British, and sad for what we have become, but hopeful that we can change.

James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. This is a profound and beautiful book about the land, and how we should live off it.

Through the eyes of James Rebanks as a grandson, son, and then father, we witness the tragic decline of traditional agriculture, and glimpse what we must now do to make it right again. As an evocation of British landscape past and present, it's up there with Cider With Rosie.

A beautiful and important book.

English Pastoral is a work of art. It is nourishing and grounding to read ... this brave and beautiful book will shape hearts and minds.

A wonderful, humane book told through the eyes of a man who has watched much vanish from his land, and now wants to put it back ... Moving and illuminating.

James Rebanks describes the life of a Lakeland working farmer from the inside with a unrivalled truth and eloquence

Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times. A vital book for anybody who eats

James Rebanks is a beautiful writer, in a unique position to describe the challenges currently being faced by farmers throughout the world. English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen.

Farming, unlike almost any other job, is bound up in a series of complex ropes that Rebanks captures in his own story so beautifully: family pressure and loyalty, ego, loneliness, and a special kind of peer pressure...English Pastoral is going to be the most important book published about our countryside in decades, if not a generation

A deeply personal account by a farmer of what has happened to farming in Britain. Everyone interested in food should read this compelling, informative, moving book

Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all.

Moving, thought-provoking and beautifully written.

English Pastoral is one of the most captivating memoirs of recent years ...The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. Like the best books, it gives you hope and new energy.

James Rebanks has a sharp eye and a lyrical heart. His book is devastating, charting the murderous and unsustainable revolution in modern farming ... But it is also uplifting: Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. Truly a significant book for our time.

Lyrical and illuminating ... will fascinate city-dwellers and country-lovers alike.

A lyrical account of Rebanks' childhood on the Lake District farm that he's made famous; an account of how he learned about stockmanship and community and the rhythms of the land from his father and grandfather. [...] His writing is properly Romantic, which is a high compliment [...] Rebanks is obviously a wonderful human as well as a splendid writer.

A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable.' Mr. Rebanks hits all the right notes and deserves to be heard

The most important story, perfectly told

Memorable, urgent, eloquent ... Rebanks speaks with blunt, unmatched authority. He is also a fine writer with descriptive power and a gift for characterisation ... English Pastoral may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring