The brilliance of Enigma is that it gives readers the sense of being contemporary with its characters and then leads them on a dark journey of discovery to arrive at another of the Second World War's blackest horror stories, one not fully admitted until half a century later... Altogether top-class stuff. Peter Millar

Enigma totally gripped me

After the resounding success of his first novel, Fatherland, the question was what would Robert Harris do for an encore? This is his resounding answer

Extraordinarily good... undoubtedly the best thriller of the year, and perhaps of several years to come

I finished the book regretful it had ended, and full of wonder at this extraordinary world, people and achievements it evoked

Blends carefully researched fact with brilliantly realised fiction... a compulsive page turner until its surprising secrets are finally decrypted

A first class plot... the characters steadily evolve and deepen. Out of wartime Cambridge and Bletchley lurches the computer age

The brilliance of Enigma is that it gives readers the sense of being contemporary with its characters and then leads them on a dark journey of discovery to arrive at another of the Second World War's blackest horror stories, one not fully admitted until half a century later... Altogether top-class stuff.

Beautiful...Farndale's elegant prose, his storytelling ability and the wise tolerance with which he views...his characters lend his exhilarating novel a tenderly redemptive afterimage.

It makes exhilarating reading, all the better for its satirical edge.

Love, terrorism, plane crashes, Passchendaele, religious visions... The highest compliment one can pay Farndale... is that the material is so well marshalled that the narrative unfurls without strain....beautifully done.

Philosophically ambitious and deftly crafted, Nigel Farndale's novel has one leg planted in the trenches of the First World War and the other placed sure-footedly in the present...perspicacious observations of human behaviour... beautiful.

A constantly engaging and witty novel from a tremendously clever writer.

Plausiby drawn....strong central characters, interesting subplots and well-sketched minor characters.

As idiosyncratic as it is ambitious...given shape and purpose by a true literary craftsman. The book both keeps you reading and makes you think.

I drank in Nigel Farndale's The Blasphemer in huge lungfuls, and mourned it when it was finished. For anyone who loved Saturday, Atonement or Birdsong, this is the generational novel at its best.