My ideal read - I couldn't put it down

A sweeping tale, beautifully written in a wonderful setting, heart rending yet ultimately up lifting. Gorgeous.

The sights, smells and atmosphere of Ceylon are beautifully depicted. This is Dinah Jefferies at her best.

The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists

No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than did Graham Greene

An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist

Agonising, funny. His eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie seen back to front into a vision which, in its weird way, is as effecting as any short passage ever written against war

Very tough and very funny...sad and delightful...very Vonnegut

Splendid art... a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears

Brilliant...this war story is expertly entertaining: various modes of popular heroics are parodied, pitiful instances of human folly stripped and displayed tragi-comically... Dense with reverberant cross-references and juxtapositions

The oddest and most directly and obliquely heart-searching war book for years...Devastating and supremely human

A most courageous account of the human condition; at the same time a satire so funny it makes one laugh aloud

Vonnegut uses fantasy to show reality in a new light... enormously funny

Extraordinary...Somehow the elements of comedy, insanity and horror push each other into the right perspective...the scrambling of the time sequences makes the novel delightfully easy reading without ever blurring the ghastliness or absurdity of what happened. The blending of fantasy and documentation is masterly