Magnificent...full of wit, sharp insight and vivid description.

Wonderfully entertaining

So glittering is the overall parade … and so entertaining the surface that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do these things so elegantly is no small achievement

A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war

A delicate, tough, mesmerising epic that grabs you by the hand and takes you straight into war, flight, and a complex and vulnerable young marriage

One must salute the brilliance … the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances

Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing

I shall be surprised, and, I must admit, dismayed if the whole work is not recognized as a major achievement in the English novel since the war. Certainly it is an astonishing recreation.

Lush and lyrical -- and darkly funny even at its most gut-punching -- Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy manages to simultaneously be a sweeping panorama of a Europe in crisis and a discomfitingly intimate portrait of a no-less-broken marriage.

An important 20th-century writer who paints a complex relationship between gender and power with wit and sensitivity

Inspired by Manning's own life, it's a portrait of a marriage as well as a disintegrating society, written with a cool eye and ironic style

Manning is an astute observer of people and writes eloquently about their traits and behaviours. Thus, The Great Fortune is rich with eccentric characters ... A real pleasure to re-read the first volume of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in this new Anniversary Edition and to revel in her erudite prose.

Manning's depictions of abandoned Harriet's solitary explorations of seething, colourful Bucharest are fabulous.

An addictive, gripping literary saga ... A sharp portrait of a young marriage under pressure and a vivid picture of being a Brit in an increasingly hostile and impoverished corner of Europe.

Olivia Manning takes autobiographical writing to a refreshingly new dimension. In The Balkan Trilogy she follows the well-worn mantra that authors should write about what they know, but she does so without sounding self-centred, a quality that so often dogs memoirs. Her's reads like wholly invented fiction with made-up, yet believable characters. It has been such a joy to re-read Manning's Trilogy...Manning's characterisation throughout the Trilogy is excellent. Her most astute depiction of a person in genuine inner conflict with himself is Guy Pringle...The author's depiction of Bucharest and the places Harriet and Guy visit are bold and colourful.

In the great tradition of SS-GB and Fatherland, Rubin's alternative-1950s murder mystery takes an ingenious premise - the Americans and the Soviets have carved up Britain between them after rescuing the country from the Nazis - and makes it come alive through sheer storytelling skill

Immersive

A lovely novel by a writer who lives and breathes France

Another terrific, intelligent read from Faulks

A gripping book that I devoured in about three days; this dark book reminds us of the history that lurks around every street corner

Gaël Faye makes us smile, despite the seriousness of his words

What is autobiographical, and what imagined? In the end it doesn’t matter, when he Gaël Faye gives life to the lost land of his childhood, with poetry and modesty

Small Country is a stirring and graceful tale of stolen innocence and fragmented identity. Hopeful, raw and deeply human, it is a modern classic in the making.

An excellent novel, a model of restraint and quiet literary sophistication

Cherry, Nico Walker’s outstanding debut, is a hard-hitting, ghoulishly funny novel about drug addiction, war and bank robbery.

Heartbreaking, unadorned, radically absent of pretense, Cherry is the debut novel America needs now, a letter from the frontlines of opioid addiction and, almost subliminally, a war story.

Nico Walker’s Cherry is a wrenching, clear-eyed stare-down into the abyss of war, addiction and crime, a dark tumble into scumbaggery, but it’s also deeply humane and truly funny. That is one of the reasons I love it so much: it makes you laugh and ache at the same time, in the manner of the great Denis Johnson.

One of the most exciting new American novelists.

Heavily indebted to the profane blood, guts, bullets, and opiate-strewn absurdities dreamed up by Thomas McGuane, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, Cherry tells a story that feels infinitely more real, and undeniably tougher than the rest.

A bruising dispatch from the frontline of the American opioid crisis… the final quarter [of Cherry] rushes by in a cold sweat.

[An] incendiary debut… Nico Walker writes with real rhythm, exhibiting a poet’s discrimination about adjectival choice and the relative length of clauses. It is a rare and remarkable achievement to turn such suffering into a novel of such finely calibrated beauty.

A gritty, addictive read.

I think everyone should read it – it is so horrific.

A well-received return to form

Astonishingly bold novel… [It] is Amis’s best work in years

Amis’s best work since Money