4.55 avg rating — 745,664 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 — 22,149 ratings

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

3.87 avg rating — 30,860 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 — 1,468 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 — 359,393 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"

3.96 avg rating — 11,421 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 — 6,547 ratings

3.75 avg rating — 3,949 ratings

3.80 avg rating — 3,987,608 ratings

3.71 avg rating — 4,009 ratings

3.97 avg rating — 27,340 ratings

4.14 avg rating — 404,585 ratings

4.20 avg rating — 45,980 ratings

4.54 avg rating — 22,953 ratings

3.61 avg rating — 457,662 ratings

4.01 avg rating — 116,097 ratings

3.77 avg rating — 19,125 ratings

3.85 avg rating — 129,287 ratings

3.90 avg rating — 2,645 ratings

4.41 avg rating — 48,711 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 — 28,361 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.""

4.07 avg rating — 501,940 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 — 79,182 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.""

3.92 avg rating — 537,948 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 — 312,335 ratings

3.98 avg rating — 108,638 ratings

3.87 avg rating — 27,167 ratings

4.09 avg rating — 1,328,922 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 72,758 ratings

3.62 avg rating — 17,617 ratings

3.89 avg rating — 9,826 ratings

3.95 avg rating — 90,750 ratings

3.44 avg rating — 937,836 ratings

3.83 avg rating — 49,118 ratings

3.93 avg rating — 18,150 ratings

3.53 avg rating — 14,010 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 337,385 ratings

4.03 avg rating — 67,776 ratings

4.08 avg rating — 61,239 ratings

3.75 avg rating — 17,171 ratings

4.01 avg rating — 1,893 ratings

3.80 avg rating — 378,046 ratings

4.02 avg rating — 55,538 ratings

4.07 avg rating — 32,267 ratings

4.07 avg rating — 3,038 ratings

3.64 avg rating — 56,532 ratings

3.59 avg rating — 303,961 ratings

3.59 avg rating — 14,577 ratings