'Powerful, polemical pieces'

'Some of the best stories that have appeared in this country in years'

Munro has been compared with Proust, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and remains - though dazzling - quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing smooth and supple

A work of great brilliance and depth... Munro's power of analysis, of sensation, and thoughts, is almost Proustian in its sureness

Only a few writers continue to create those full-bodied miniature universes of the old school. Some of her short stories are so ample and fulfilling that they feel like novels. They present whole landscapes and cultures, whole families of characters

In range and depth her short stories are almost novels...complete, complex, and brilliantly structured... One of the finest living short-story writers

One of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story

Like her similarly gifted contemporaries Peter Taylor, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien...Alice Munro writes stories that have the density - moral, emotional, sometimes historical - of other writers' novels

A...writer of great sensitivity and delicacy. Her new collection of stories show no falling off in her gift for putting the ordinary into a sharp, clear persepective, seem very near and also very far away

She draws her readers irresistably into the undergrowth of other people's private lives

Atwood...writes infectiously... page after page proving that...[her] lavish literary talents remain wholly undiminished

[Old Babes in the Wood] showcase[s] Atwood's spiky wit and imagination

The 15 stories in this collection from the stellar Margaret Atwood are book-ended by the touching, tender, grief-tinged tales of Tig and Nell

There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we're stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it's Margaret Atwood . . . Long may she reign

As affecting as any of Atwood's strongest work

In Old Babes in the Wood, Margaret Atwood delivers her signature sci-fi with a human heart. It is a story collection that teems with playfulness and invention... reminding us of her skill in the short form

A highly personal collection

The Tig and Nell stories... are subtle and poignant, written in grief and from the heart

Devastating and thought-provoking in equal measure, you will find yourself thoroughly entertained - and we're sure you'll return to these again and again

Old Babes in the Wood... [is] a clear demonstration of her prevailing skill as a writer

As her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood debuts at the top of the fiction chart, Margaret Atwood can rest assured that she has reached literary legend status. It was one thing for The Handmaid's Tale to make it to No 1, but quite another for stories narrated by snails and aliens to do it

Her latest collection of short stories... proves once again she's also an impassioned observer of everyday people and their struggles, with a hilarious sense of humour

Each [story] is interesting in its own right...Atwood's imagination and mastery of storytelling is evident

[A] writer who is still so sparky and brilliant in the sudden ways she tips you into despair or delight. Whatever she's up to, I'll take more if it's going

Quietly devastating

Any new publication by the estimable Atwood...is an event and this collection of 15 short stories is no exception

Bracing, darkly funny and cheerfully unsentimental