If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Ingenious

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Mind-bending and thoroughly post-modern, Calvino's masterpiece of self-reference ('you' are part of the plot), its dizzyingly clever, labyrinthine construction has made it a classic

Marc Chacksfield, ShortList

Breathtakingly inventive

David Mitchell

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

Guardian

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

Salman Rushdie

A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair

Lorna Sage, Observer

A brilliant work of the imagination and the intellect working in union. And, by the way, it's very funny also

Scotsman