AS Byatt
Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is wise and strong and unputdownable. But I also loved Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil, to which the reviews I have seen did not do justice. It is about terrifying things in Afghanistan, at which Aslam looks bleakly and uncompromisingly. But it is also wonderfully written and imagined – he has the most precise and delightful eye for colours and textures, small gestures and human incomprehension. He knows what he is writing about, and is impatient with ideologues and belief systems, while always patient with human weakness. The book changes the reader. Aslam is an important writer.

Fay Weldon
Zoe Heller’s The Believers is a novel of ideas, concerned with intelligent people emotionally at war with their own principles. The undumbed-down novel has been in short supply of late – all the more gratifying now to find one, strongly written, full of events and peopled with lively characters one is not obliged to like.