Both fun and funny. It is sharp too, in the sense of painful as well as witty... Barnes dissects with tremendous verve and insight this awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche. He also tears at your heart

A maverick form of family memoir that is mainly an extended reflection on the fear of death and on that great consolation, religious belief... It is entertaining, intriguing, absorbing...an inventive and invigorating slant on what is nowadays called 'life writing'. It took me hours to write this review because each reference to my notes set me off rereading; that is a reviewer's ultimate accolade

A brilliant bible of elegant despair...that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one you must read before you die

Intensely fascinating

An elegant memoir and meditation. A deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter

An essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void

Intensely serious book of striking elegance: a clever, complicated reverie on last things, so full of ideas as to reveal itself quite slowly, through frequent re-reading

A fantastic work of non-fiction, a showcase for his elegantly unfussy sentences and Barnes's ability to burrow to the very bottom of a subject, no matter how daunting

Julian Barnes takes on the ambitious subject of death - and succeeds brilliantly

It is a sincere, humble work, punctuated by moments of poignancy

This year, its moving, sly, terrified grappling with the approach of extinction overwhelmed me

A rather beautiful account of the birth and evolution of Islam ... Lucid and illuminating ... Fascinating

Aslan is an engaging writer, his strength lies ... as an observer of contemporary challenges facing Islam ... Sensitive and generous

Enthralling. A book of tremendous clarity and generosity of spirit