The fiction equivalent of a brisk walk followed by a hot buttered crumpet: fresh, invigorating, comforting and heartening

The fiction equivalent of a brisk walk followed by a hot buttered crumpet: fresh, invigorating, comforting and heartening

Few writers give more pleasure and joy to their readers. Trapido has such a gift for seeing the world’s weight so clearly and writing about it so lightly

It is the perfect book. Beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, and utterly ageless. The first time I read it, I knew within pages that Brother of the More Famous Jack was going to become my favourite novel. The second time, that this brilliant, funny, intensely moving work is everything I aspire to as a writer. Every reading since, that devotion to Barbara Trapido is my only true requisite in a friend

Can we talk about Barbara Trapido? I love those books so much … So charming, they’re absolutely gorgeous. For me, reading Barbara Trapido is like entering a entirely different world … I’d recommend everyone read Brother of the More Famous Jack

Still as fresh and funny after all those years; the perfect coming-of-age novel

Why did it take me so long to discover the singular joys of Barbara Trapido's novels? Why, for so many years, had I missed these witty, soulful, heartbreaking, expansive, brilliant tales? What have I been wasting my time doing? Reading books that AREN'T perfect? Never again!

I am wildly jealous of anyone who hasn’t yet read Barbara Trapido. They have yet to discover the joy of her often hilarious and always profound world; they are about to meet her intricate cast of recurring characters; they will soon have those glorious moments of Trapidean epiphany when they realise – oh! – the boy in this book is the child of a woman in that book. There is no-one like Barbara. Buy all her books, quick, and then sit back, crack the spines, and prepare to marvel

Brother of the More Famous Jack is the book we need right now: smart, funny, honest, painful and true. It is the best possible company as we make our way through this difficult world. I love it

A moving, intense, earthy and witty book, both illuminating and extraordinary as a first novel

She is a writer I feel genuinely evangelical about, and I think she's criminally underread. I'd honestly go to Speaker's Corner and stand on a box and read out passages from Brother of the More Famous Jack, such is my love for it

The exuberance, the humour, the gritty toughness and the sadness ... I really love the way she writes

I adored Brother of the More Famous Jack. It is redolent of classics like The Constant Nymph with both its true voice and wonderfully sage and sanguine heroine

Brother of the More Famous Jack is one of the funniest, warmest, sexiest, sharpest novels I’ve ever read. I must have read it a dozen times: I turn to it whenever the world seems drear, for it has such light and such joy in it

Its high spirits are irresistible … the heroine is unstoppable

Perfect characters and dialogue - the most satisfying book I've ever read

A story, like Mansfield Park, of falling in love with a whole family

The style is hectic and passionate, the jokes thick and fast, the emotions full and right, the humanity total and engulfing ... a first fruit to savour and exalt

A very funny book ... A complex and highly polished work ... Barbara Trapido has that rare ability to make her characters respond to small misfortunes and irritations exactly as people do

I've given ... Brother of the More Famous Jack to dozens of people, and like me, they fall rapturously in love with Trapido's breezy, raunchy and unsentimental style

A sort of bohemian Brideshead Revisited

Very funny, very English, very sad

A highly promising debut – fast, inventive, funny

This is a first novel ... but if established writers could get this good on the seventh try, readers would be the richer for it ... What a lovely novel – charming, intelligent and a happy ending too. Barbara Trapido, where have you been?

If you've been looking for a modern love story that shines with off-beat charm and sprightly intelligence – not to mention elegance of style – take heart ... This brief account cannot do justice to the wry, civilized tone and understated wit that lights up Trapido’s writing

A pleasure … full of excellent things, enormously exuberant, carried along for the most part on vivid dialogue for which Ms Trapido has an uncannily perceptive ear

Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa and is the author of seven novels - Brother of the More Famous Jack (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction), Noah's Ark, Temples of Delight (shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Juggling, The Travelling Hornplayer (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award), Frankie and Stankie (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award) and Dancing With Stravinsky. She lives in Oxford.