Alan Cumming

"Margaret Atwood is so clever and brilliant just reading her book and keeping up with it made me feel like a genius. But to engage a reader emotionally over so many different story lines is awe-inspiring."

"Again it's all about the visceral! She understands yearning like no one else. And also I love a good historic European romp."

"This is like a Scottish 'Catcher in the Rye.' You actually feel you're inside this women's head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself I so admire her accuracy in every detail."

"This is the story of a woman who has been discarded and who will not go down gently. If ever there was an unsung heroine of feminist literature, it is the amazing Jean Rhys."

"I grew up reading the Famous Five books, and recently I reread the first one and was shocked to realize it contains the first trans person I ever encountered, and also how much its almost fetishistic description of food had everything to do with the rationing that Britain was ensuring at the time. Lashings and lashing of ginger beer!"

"I found this book so educational in terms of what it must have been like to grow up in America, discovering you need to harbor a secret. And the yearning in these pages is so palpable."

"Margaret Thatcher loomed over my youth, and so she did with Damian Barr’s, though more pointedly and intricately woven in his. This is harrowing family saga but written with an abundance of wit and tenderness."

"This is the unedited and unadulterated version of the stories that made up Isherwood’s books Goodbye To Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains, which were the source material for the play I Am A Camera and later the musical Cabaret. I find it fascinating that Isherwood still writes about himself in the third person. An interesting literary device, yet it feels like a smokescreen and leaves you wondering how much more there is to tell."