A. S. Byatt's three-tale sequence hits the imagination's retina with all the vibrant splatter of an exploding paintbox... Everywhere, scenes sizzle with chromatic intensity

Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion

A writer of dazzling inventiveness

Brilliant... Byatt's fiction, like Matisse's art, pays close attention to colours and contours of surfaces, then probes beneath them to reveal further suprises

Exquisite triptych... The Matisse Stories is richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people

Stepping into the world of The Pink House is like getting home and discovering someone has already run a hot, bubbly bath for you after a hard day's work. Emma and Hugh's story is intriguing and twisty. They've been married for what feels like forever and it's been mostly...well...okay. The children are great but they're independent now, and the chance to relocate to Hugh's idyllic family home in the country is too difficult for Emma to resist. What follows is a voyage of discovery for them all that turns Emma's largely contented life upside down. A kaleidoscope of family complications tends to threaten Emma's equilibrium but nothing daunted, she breezes forward and gets right on with socking it to them all.
I adored every moment of this blissful book!

Praise for Catherine Alliott

Warm, witty and wise

A huge treat. Hilarious yet poignant

Her writing is both intelligent and sparkling

Hilarious and full of surprises

This warm-hearted, uplifting story is filled with happiness, summer sun and ice cream. It's the perfect holiday read.

The perfect summer romance novel to give you butterflies, celebrating all things sunshine, the seaside and ice cream - yes please!

The perfect summer read to pack in your suitcase

A lovely, heart-warming read

A perfect read for your holiday

This is the ultimate summer seaside getaway read

Irresistible comfort read

Honest and beautifully written

Noble is the mistress of the tearjerking message of love

A moving and warm-hearted story of friendship and love . . . Elizabeth Noble writes wonderfully real and relatable characters and then puts their lives under the microscope, weaving their stories with tenderness and humanity

Other People's Husbands is a compelling, honest and uplifting tale which will have you hooked from first page to last

An artful game of distortion... Clever handling

A curious piece of autobiographical fiction

A wisecracking thriller hightailing between love and betrayal, with serious counter-espionage credentials thrown in... This is ultimately a book about writing, wordplay and knowingness

No contemporary novelist is more enthralled by what goes on inside the human skull than Ian McEwan... Sweet Tooth, which juxtaposes contrasting casts of mind, reminds you that, as well as intelligence, the intelligence service fascinates McEwan... Always excellent at conjuring up places and periods on the cusp of dramatic change... McEwan atmospherically resurrects the strife-ridden Britain of 1972 -73... Similarities and contrasts between the mentality and mind games of the secret service and those of the creative writer are increasingly brought to the fore. Doubling back and forth across genre boundaries, Sweet Tooth takes risks: narrative loiterings and twists whose purpose isn’t at first apparent, a payoff that is long delayed. But – ideally read more than once – this acute, witty novel is a winningly cunning addition to McEwan’s fictional surveys of intelligence

Must read... Intrigue, love and mutual betrayal by a master of the art

The great thing about McEwan is that, despite his success, he continues to work hard, producing ever more accessible and entertaining stories

Carefully researched

McEwan, as always, presents an engaging narrator... The plot is fantastic... McEwan plays with the readers expectations, and surpasses them all with a fabulous ending that makes me itch to re-read this superb novel all over again. Sweet Tooth marks another triumph for a brilliant British author

A pleasing, tricksy beast with a subsumed sense of metatextuality likely to be pleasing to his fans

Adroitly done...highly diverting

A triumphant shedding of genre limitations

This most cunning of authors entertains and manipulates his readers. Sweet Tooth is a masterclass in the art of fiction

Ian McEwan is getting better and better… Supremely tense, intellectually sharp, and honed as hell

McEwan’ssmoothly contrived thriller hightails between love and betrayal, with serious counter-espionage credentials thrown in

An expertly crafted thriller written with a bucketload of suspense and wit

As richly textured as anything Ian McEwan has written

Brilliantly cunning… It’s a story of love, betrayal and duplicity, with the most startling deception reserved for the final pages

Playful, clever, knowing and full of stories

Supremely tense, intellectually sharp, and honed as hell

Beyond virtuoso twists and turns, McEwan lays out the foreign landscape of 40 years ago – from smoky pubs to fuming punditry – with wry, affectionate panache

Tricksy, but satisfying

The sense of narrative purpose exerts its pull from the first