Given Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era.

Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations...Mitchell's excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece.

At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice - Dickens made me want to be a writer - but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens' full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience.

Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game

Encountering The Tin Drum in the early sixties was like discovering a new planet, a reinvention of literature. It brings the exhilaration of discovery, linked with an enormous gratitude for the way in which Günter Grass makes the world a worthwhile place to be in, and living a worthwhile thing to do. He has forever pushed back - and opened up - our concept and awareness of what is real, and what is possible, and what we dare to dream about.

This is a big book in every sense, full of extraordinary scenes and characters: even on a single reading it seems prodigally rich in comic invention, and demands to be worried at time and again

The Tin Drum has had an enduring impact on international fiction, and to read this new translation is to experience a novel you may or may not already know and discover a living, talking, shouting work of art

The new translation by Breon Mitchell sticks much more closely to the original text than Manheim's and emulates some of the German linguistic traits that Grass uses....this new translation of Die Blechtrommel reminds us, Grass retains his huge stature as a novelist

Mitchell has captured the novel's syncopated, driving rhythms with an extra brio and brilliance

Exhilarated and terrified ... Golden is plunged into a world where violent death could arrive at any moment and any pleasures that present themselves (an unexpected affair with an Italian nurse, for example) must be seized immediately. Sebag Montefiore PAINTS HIS VERBAL PICTURES of the WAR IN BOLD PRIMARY COLOURS ... SHEER ENERGY OF STORYTELLING AND GRAND SWEEP OF NARRATIVE.

IT'S LONESOME DOVE MEETS STALINGRAD. A band of outlaws riding & fighting for their lives on sweeping plains - but these bandits are not battling tribes in the Wild West, they are on the grasslands of south Russia at war with Nazi Germany and its ally, the Italians. Our hero is not a Texas Ranger but a Jewish writer named Benya Golden. Montefiore has brought his understand of Russian history to life here with great gusto traversing Gulags, battlefields and Kremlin but Golden is a lover not a fighter...

Tolstoyan

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s skill with imagery is such that he immerses his reader in an utterly ethereal landscape … Montefiore can effortlessly meld beauty and battle

For the sheer pleasure of being swept away in an epic tale of love and war by a master storyteller, Red Sky At Noon by Simon Sebag Montefiore had me enthralled from beginning to end. This is the final part of his Moscow trilogy – a series of compelling historical novels in the great tradition of Scott, Thackeray and Tolstoy.