Brilliant - a remarkable feat of rhetorical beauty and overwhelming truth... A terrific collection - brilliantly varied, constantly surprising chips of a superb imagination

Amis is immaculate as a comic stylist - irresistible

This volume is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in where we are and how we got here

Comic inversions, fantastical celebrations and ripe satire - of popular culture, personal relationships, even the space-time continuum - all jostle in these pages... Simply ace

Amis applies his comic timing, his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time

Alice Munro! Now that's writing

That Munro is a great writer of short stories should go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive

This superb collection...confirms Munro's place as the laureate of thwarted passion - and quite possibly the greatest short-story writer at work today