A fine and profoundly intelligent novel, written by an author who balances big ideas with human emotion. Wistful, yearning and wise.

Faulks's most poignant love story yet

What we're reading on holiday.

Sebastian Faulks' latest novel is beautifully written, shot through with a sense of the frailty of love that is at times reminiscent of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms... This is a superb novel

A 5* masterpiece that I devoured in a day

Beautifully written and compelling

A yearning, wistful, lovelorn novel, intent on exploring the price of being human.

Faulks on his best form.

Fascinating . . . impeccably researched . . . At the heart of this rich, dark story, however, is not politics but psychology . . . Faulks's committed fans will be left looking forward to the next instalment of this thought-provoking trilogy.

A magnificent, moving novel.

A tale of love - lost and found - and the strength of the human spirit.

This charming read is as warming, rich and comforting as a mug of hot chocolate

This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely

Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft

Set in Coe's native
Midlands and told through the
lives of four generations of one
family, beginning with 11-year-old
Mary in 1945, Bournville is a
poignant, clever and witty portrait
of social change and how the
British see themselves.

Bournville is Jonathan Coe's most ambitious novel yet . . . a novel about people and place. Entertaining and often poignant, it presents a captivating portrait of how Britons lived then and the way they live now

A book of things blended together: comedy with tragedy, England's past with its present, and cocoa solids with vegetable fat . . . the best fictional portrayal of lockdown that I've read

Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights. For anyone who has felt lost in the past six years, it is like meeting an ally

Coe is an eminently readable novelist

Full of vibrant characters and fabulous dialogue, which switches from laugh-out-loud funny to extremely poignant

The changing face of postwar Britain is brilliantly captured

As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. To show three generations of an ordinary Midlands family, their paths taken and not taken, their friends, lovers, jobs, achievements and losses; to interweave this with 75 years of national history - and to do so with such a lightness of touch is a tremendous achievement. All the absurdities of our nation wrapped up in something as bitter, sweet, and addictive as a bar of the best Bournville chocolate

Affectionate, full of good humour, and often moving, this is Coe at his best.

Slips down a treat

For all the novel's satirical tang and historical sweep, it's at root a tender portrait of apparently simple folk trying to fathom the mystery of their own personalities

A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships

There is much to enjoy here, as in all Coe's novels . . . an intelligent criticism of our shared history since 1945

[Coe] has a huge talent for balancing humour with poignancy

Simultaneously intimate and transnational . . . this is deeply engaging, serious and beautiful writing that carries its echoing questions with grace

Compelling . . . Superb characterisation and sharp insights throughout make this an immensely enjoyable novel

Intelligent and enthralling

The Magician, Colm Tóibín's new novel about Mann, resists the shallow gestures of Hollywood biopics, reaching for something mainstream film couldn't get at, or wouldn't bother with. How does an artist create, and can a true artist live as the rest of us do?

This meticulously woven novel re-creates the life of Thomas Mann . . . An ode to a 20th-century genius and a feat of literary sorcery in its own right

The personal and public history is compelling . . . an intriguing view of a writer who well deserves another turn on the literary stage

[The Magician] vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself

This vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself

Compelling . . . Tóibín succeeds in conveying his fascination with the Magician, as his children called him, who could make sexual secrets vanish beneath a rich surface life of family and uncommon art . . . intriguing

Employing luxurious prose that quietly evokes the tortured soul behind these literary masterpieces, Tóibín has an unequalled gift for mapping the interior of genius

Literary lovers will want to sink into this absorbing reimagining of the life of the Nobel Prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann . . . Mann family members have their own struggles - with each other and a world where they rarely feel at home - all vividly brought to life

You don't have to be a Thomas Mann fan to be gripped by the account of his life that author Colm Tóibín delivers in his new novel . . . [Tóibín's] his biggest triumph is in getting to the heart of Mann's dilemma

A celebration of what novels can do

Devastatingly human . . . savage, sordid and hauntingly believable

Tremendous, richly beautiful, wonderful . . . it does everything we ought to ask of a great novel

Subtle and enthralling