Praise for Dorothy Dunnett

A storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about pace, suspense and imaginative invention

Marvellous, breathtaking

A masterpiece of historical fiction

One of the greatest tale-spinners since Dumas

Lashings of excitement, colour and subtlety

Vivid, engaging, densely plotted - are almost certainly destined to be counted among the classics of popular fiction

A poignant tale of life, love and loss

Traditional, light-hearted romantic fiction at its best

Poignant and humorous

A buoyant tale that will have you laughing and crying from start to finish

The twists and turns in the plot will leave you dizzy

The story is original and the suspense is skilfully built. An infuriatingly enjoyable feel-good read

An engaging and original plot

Winterson’s witty and imaginatively plotted novel is a dizzying tour of future possibilities… Timely and thought-provoking, Frankisstein raises questions about the role of out bodies, the future of relationships, and, ultimately what it means to be human.

Shot through with references from Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare and TS Eliot, Winterson’s latest offering has a flavour of classical legend. She makes the world afresh, whole emphasising the human need for super-human figure and god-like intelligence is eternal.

An essential read for now.

Winterson always pushes boundaries with her writing and this novel is no different.

Winterson’s bold novel asks old questions about the body’s possibilities in a provocative new way.

Playfully allusive and relentlessly readable, it’s a book so wild and fizzing with ideas you feel it might actually pop.

Playful and inventive… There is a merged ocean of thought with [Frankisstein]; ideas slip between characters and time frames. Frankisstein reincarnates as it evolves, each part deepening the part before it.

A weird and engaging and extremely funny take on Shelley’s classic… The book seeks to shift our perspective on humanity, I think, and the purpose of being… Technology today is allowing us to shape our notions of sex and gender; tomorrow, it will shape our end.

I'm awestruck, as always, by Jeanette Winterson…. Frankissstein…is a dazzlingly bonkers reworking of Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, featuring artificial intelligence, sex robots and sci-fi experiments.

Frankisstein leaps from the Peterloo Massacre to contemporary bioethical speculation to nineteenth-century Bedlam to early computers, its eager, passionately clever narrator always plunging enthusiastically ahead, like the mysterious giant figure Mary Shelley glimpsed racing across that icy glacier.

An oft-moving, oft-hilarious retelling of Shelley’s much-retold classic.

Winterson teases away at…boundaries – between genders, life and death, fact and fiction, human and machine – to great, and hugely entertaining effect.

Jeanette Winterson’s latest book is a shape-shifting, time-hopping gem of a novel… Reading one of Winterson’s books is like going on a magic carpet ride through her subconscious… her stories are creative, overflowing with ideas, and shot through with her wicked sense of humour.

Rich, thoughtful, and entertaining… [a] heady combination of literary history, futurology, and romance.

An utterly brilliant book from one of the most talented writers of the moment

Frankissstein not only draws on the stories of real contemporary research around artificial intelligence and cryogenics, but also features historical figures and their compelling stories of scientific insight and discovery… I've read much of Winterson's work over the years and it seems to me she re-awakened the literary playfulness of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry with this offering.

Top Holiday Reads - BEST FOR SALVING THE SOUL

Gentle, moving, joyous

Full of insight and sympathy. It is also highly absorbing — partly because of Tyler’s evocative style (when Micah considers his past, he is “visited by a kind of translucent scarf of a memory floating down upon him”), but mostly because of the intimacy with which she depicts the workings of Micah’s heart and mind...a quiet revelation

In wonderful prose, Tyler drills deep into a very ordinary life, familiar struggles, and a quiet heroism

Anne Tyler's masterful new novel asks what it might take for an unhappy man to change his life... her longevity means that her work has become a record of a certain kind of America, especially of "the dailiness of women's lives", for the past half century.

A quiet and beautiful story about human relationships, written with intent observation, empathy and humour

A timely reminder of what matters: kindness and love

This gloriously warm novel felt heaven-sent when it appeared in deepest lockdown

A new book from this wonderful writer is always a joy... Tyler packs feeling and insight into every single sentence

I adored Redhead by the Side of the Road... It is so subtle, and so brilliant as are all Tyler's novels... Witty and warm, its only fault was that I wanted it to be twice as long!

Tender and beautifully paced

Compassionate and alert to the complexities in even the most ordinary lives, the book reminds us why, at 79, Tyler is held in such high regard

The qualities that have long won Tyler admiration and affection - wry humour, shrewd perception, characters who leap off the page with authenticity - are in generous supply

You can't go wrong with Anne Tyler. She makes it look easy creating characters that feel so believable, so three-dimensional

Tyler engrosses with the 'and-thenand-then' of domestic detail

I do think the world would probably be a better place if everyone read Anne Tyler . . . She's such a brilliantly empathetic writer - there's no 'them' and 'us' in Tyler's world - and she often writes from the perspective of the kind of people who you would walk past and barely notice in the street . . . Reading Tyler helps people to become better people, and I really fully believe that

Tyler's irresistibly readable 23rd novel follows Micah, a socially inept, OCD-ish IT man whose orderly life is turned upside down by the arrival of a son

Tyler's affectionate and quietly observant novel reveals her deep empathy for the hidden struggles of everyday lives

Another shrewd yet kindly novel about the mysterious business of family life by one of the world's great writers

A charmingly offbeat love story

The narration here is a joy: you will be leaning towards the speaker to catch every nuance of Tyler's gently comediccharacterstudy of the Baltimore bachelor and fix-it man Micah Mortimer