4.54 avg rating — 741,735 ratings

""I loved this as a child, reread it as a young adult with disdain but now reread it with renewed wonder and admiration. An extraordinary universe of a novel, construed fundamentally from a confluence of languages, real and invented, into heroic and mundane life." -Adam Roberts"

4.28 avg rating — 22,064 ratings

""The reenchantment of existence." -Adam Roberts"

3.87 avg rating — 30,447 ratings

""More perfect in form and address even than "Pale Fire" or "Lolita". By turns pinpoint brilliant in description, funny, tender and eventually immensely moving."-Adam Roberts"

3.71 avg rating — 1,458 ratings

""People don't seem to read Scott any more, which is a shame: there's a reason why he was the first global superstar of the novel, why the Victorians thought him the greatest writer of his epoch, and this is his greatest work."- Adam Roberts"

3.83 avg rating — 356,427 ratings

""The first, and the greatest, alien invasion narrative. It distils global chaos into 200 pages by focusing on the south of England, anticipating modern warfare by projecting it imaginatively onto a Martian incursion: the first novel to represent refugees displaced by war. And the twist ending remains a brilliant coup de theatre." -Adam Roberts"

3.95 avg rating — 11,265 ratings

""One of the greatest extrapolations of a core ideas in the rich panolpy of science fiction. Priest at his best." -Adam Roberts"

3.30 avg rating — 6,516 ratings

3.76 avg rating — 3,883 ratings

3.80 avg rating — 3,959,758 ratings

3.71 avg rating — 3,936 ratings

3.97 avg rating — 27,030 ratings

4.14 avg rating — 401,917 ratings

4.21 avg rating — 44,666 ratings

4.54 avg rating — 22,811 ratings

3.61 avg rating — 454,933 ratings

4.01 avg rating — 115,035 ratings

3.77 avg rating — 19,021 ratings

3.85 avg rating — 127,913 ratings

3.90 avg rating — 2,614 ratings

4.41 avg rating — 48,225 ratings

""Mantel makes time move in extraordinary ways. Because Cromwell fits about a year’s worth of thought and action into every five minutes, time both races by and swells outwards. We know the end, and hold our breath as we travel towards it through a great space of narrative in which the grindingly inexorable mixes with limitless invention and surprise."- Alexandra Harris"

3.66 avg rating — 28,142 ratings

""Protean, generative, ingenious, leaping with life, Smith grants her readers the super-power of making connections. The linked stories glimmer through each other (like pentimenti visible through painted fresco) and there’s no saying which should take precedence.""

4.08 avg rating — 486,022 ratings

""A novel of deepest humanity, compassion and excruciating moral choice, inspired by Ireland's Magdalene laundries and its capture by the Catholic church. A man's whole life in 114 pages. Bill Furlong must choose between helping a barefoot teenager escape from the convent where she has recently given birth , or preserving his own family and business as a coal merchant one freezing Christmas Day, thus exposing the horror and cruelty his community refuses to acknowledge. A modern masterpiece, as pointed and deadly as an icicle aimed at the heart, it should have won the Booker.""

3.86 avg rating — 78,862 ratings

""Had she lived to complete all five parts of her novel, I believe that the Russian Jewish author Irène Némirovsky would be spoken of as the female Tolstoy. Her range and perceptiveness into a variety of characters is as great, as she follows her cast of characters fleeing from Paris before the Nazis arrive in June 1940, through the chaos of France to the countryside. It was a journey Némirovsky made herself, though unlike her characters she had to wear the Jewish star and was ultimately deported and murdered in Auschwittz.""

3.93 avg rating — 524,483 ratings

""Very few novels address parenthood, but this is one of them, and it is a gem. A cherry farmer's wife tells her three daughters the story of her affair with a fellow actor some 30 years before they were born. The actor became a world famous film star, whom we gradually learn has just died, and one of the narrator's daughters hopes she might be his daughter. However, we learn how a better, wiser, truer love emerged. A riff on Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, this is about the hard rewards of farming, family and real life.""

4.20 avg rating — 310,725 ratings

3.98 avg rating — 107,847 ratings

3.87 avg rating — 27,061 ratings

4.09 avg rating — 1,318,687 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 71,402 ratings

3.62 avg rating — 17,218 ratings

3.89 avg rating — 9,781 ratings

3.95 avg rating — 89,935 ratings

3.44 avg rating — 932,680 ratings

3.83 avg rating — 48,812 ratings

3.93 avg rating — 18,071 ratings

3.53 avg rating — 13,900 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 335,570 ratings

4.03 avg rating — 66,957 ratings

4.08 avg rating — 60,143 ratings

3.76 avg rating — 17,013 ratings

4.01 avg rating — 1,879 ratings

3.80 avg rating — 373,368 ratings

4.02 avg rating — 54,757 ratings

4.07 avg rating — 30,619 ratings

4.07 avg rating — 3,001 ratings

3.64 avg rating — 56,327 ratings

3.59 avg rating — 302,512 ratings

3.59 avg rating — 14,275 ratings