How Fiction Works

This compelling essay shows just how deeply, sensitively, imaginatively and joyfully he reads

Scotland on Sunday

There aren't many book reviewers whose leaving one magazine to go to work for another would make the headlines. But then there aren't many book reviewers like James Wood

Sunday Telegraph

Luminous... full of top-notch observations from the coal-face

D.J. Taylor, Independent on Sunday

Enchanting... Witty, concise, and composed with a lovely lightness of touch

Economist

Exceptionally illuminating... brilliantly acute and enticingly widely read work. It should be compulsory reading for anyone in the reviewing trade and committed to memory before aspiring writers put pen to paper. For those who intend to pursue the underrated calling of reading fiction without wishing to add to its ranks, it will not only make reading more pleasurable, but articulate what you may have felt but never been able to express

Rosemary Goring, Herald

James Wood is Britain's lost literary critic. It's impossible to read this book and not want immediately to turn back to the authors he discusses...and read more of them, more closely, yourself. And very little literary criticism achieves that

Evening Standard

Intelligent, well-read and extremely confident

Guardian

Should find a place on every novel-lover's shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it

John Sutherland, Financial Times

Fondly and delicately pieces back together what the deconstructors put asunder

Observer

Displaying a playful exuberance wonderfully at odds with the dry, jargon-strewn tradition of academic criticism, this deft, slender volume analyses how novelists pull rabbits out of hats

The Economist