Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Tapa dura

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is the book that comes closest to matching Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'. It's the highly charged story of a high achieving child, her genius Microsoft star employee father and her reclusive award-winning mother Bernadette. The family trip to Antarctica may well be their undoing. This is a hilarious novel with undoubtedly the pushiest parents ever captured in ink (Patrick Neale, Jaffe & Neale Bookshop THE BOOKSELLER)

It's intelligent but easy to read; eccentric but never twee. (ELLE UK)

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple is an innovative comic novel. The eponymous Bernadette was once a great architect but has fallen into a cycle of agoraphobia and misanthropy in Seattle. She is a bitter character who despises most other people but she's actually quite charismatic. I found myself rooting for her, which is testament to Semple's accomplished style and characterisation (Ruth Hunter, Bertrams THE BOOKSELLER)

The characters in Bernadette may be in real emotional pain, but Semple has the wit and perspective and imagination to make their story hilarious. I tore through this book with heedless pleasure (Jonathan Franzen)

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is fresh and funny and accomplished, but the best thing about it was that I never had any idea what was going to happen next. It was a wild ride... (Kate Atkinson)

A fresh, flamboyantly witty new voice (Helen Fielding)

A delightfully funny book, that constantly catches one by surprise, Where'd You Go, Bernadette combines a shrewdly observed portrait of Seattle life with, of all things, a mysterious disappearance in Antarctica. A pleasure (Matthew Kneale, author of English Passengers)

Maria Semple dissects the gory complexities of familial dysfunction with a deft and tender hand. Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a triumph of social observation and black comedy by a skillful chronicler of moneyed malaise. (Patrick de Witt, author of The Sisters Brothers)

In this funny, clever book, notorious architectural genius Bernadette disappears and it's up to her daughter Bee to find her. One to watch this summer (ESSENTIALS magazine)

A funny, flamboyant portrait of a flawed heroine's attempts to fit in (MARIE CLAIRE)