Waverley (Vintage Past)

Waverley is the first great historical novel and should be ranked alongside Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma or Tolstoy's War and Peace, both of which are bathed in the blaze of Scott's molten genius

Independent

No author - not even Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith or JK Rowling - has ever been as critically acclaimed and commercially successful as Scott

Scotland on Sunday

Scott was one of the most influential of all writers with a profound effect on all the literatures of Europe and North America. He invented the historical novel and greatly enlarged the scope of the novel as a literary form. Only Shakespeare can equal him as a creator of characters

Daily Mail

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. – It is not fair. He has Fame and Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.– I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it – but fear I must

Jane Austen

With 22 novels, six poetical marathons and 11 more prose works under his belt, the most celebrated Scotsman of his day was the first author ever to be a best seller in all three genres. What other writer, dead for 170 years, still has fishing boats and a football team named in his honour?

Independent on Sunday

The best novel by Sir Walter Scott

Goethe