Jordan turns up the heat in this battle-of-wills/lessons-in-love romance that perfectly launches The Courtship Wars series. Lively dialogue, soaring sexual tension and characters you can take to your heart make this a keeper.

Teeming with more ideas than a year's worth of ordinary novels

This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it

Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them

Our best novelist

As always, Byatt wields beautiful prose, and the mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot

Intelligent, ingenious and humane

Intelligent, literary, and ambitious...combines the drive of the thriller with the 19th-century novel, and throughout she threads the poetry and passion of ''romance''....races to a riotous final scene of storms and graveyards

You turn its last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it. This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery that starts with an old book in a London library and ends on a storm-wracked night in a churchyard before an open grave.

Proves that a serious, intricate book can also be a page turner...manifest intelligence, subtle humor and extraordinary texturing of the past within the present make Possession original and unforgettable

Shimmers with something close to genius ... If I become famous enough to be the castaway on Desert Island Discs, this is the book I'd choose. It requires effort but, trust me, it is a modern masterpiece

I couldn't put this book down: a fabulously original love story

Intriguing and uplifting - a real page-turner full of humour and mystery

Charmingly fun with bags of romance and laughs

Lyrical . . . Stedman’s debut signals a career certain to deliver future treasures

Stunning and memorable

Heart-wrenching

Exquisite

Delicate and imaginative . . . beautifully written . . . deserves every single bit of its success

Like a lighthouse, [The Light Between Oceans] shines a light in dark places, and its emotional resonance will stay with you for days

A thought-provoking debut novel . . . this beautifully delineated tale of love and loss, right and wrong, and what we will do for the happiness of those most dear to us, is moving without being maudlin

An extraordinary and heart-rending book about good people, tragic decisions, and the beauty found in each of them

Mesmerising...the sheer passion and poetry of Stedman's prose carries us on a wave of emotion and heartbreak.

The Light Between Oceans unfurls in small acts, at first feeling slight to touch, then building in emotional substance. Into the spaces between words, Stedman breathes an anxiety and pulsating intensity that roils with the ocean and the lighthouse beacon.

Pick of the month: The memorable and moving tale of one couple’s search for happiness

A description of the extraordinary, sustaining power of a marriage to bind two people together in love, through the most emotionally harrowing circumstances.

The characters are beautifully drawn...A completely unique read. ****

Book of the Week. Critics are buzzing about The Light Between Oceans, the gripping debut from M L Stedman.