The Last Word - Tapa dura

Brilliantly funny and entertaining. (David Sexton, Evening Standard)

His best work to date ... very funny ... Kureishi has written a major work, founded on a major literary problem, set by a master of his craft. (John Sutherland, The Times)

'A great read ... with vivid characters, a serpentine plot and some fizzing dialogue ... Kureishi doesn't miss a trick. The Last Word is hugely entertaining and one of his best novels for some time.' (Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday)

This is Kureishi at his mischievous, subversive best. (Boyd Tonkin, Independent)

Kureishi's best novel since The Buddha of Suburbia, perhaps because it returns to the original themes of family, race and identity ... the assertion at its heart, that a writer can be an artist, telling the truth, makes this book important as well as enjoyable. (Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday)

The provocative, powerful new novel from Hanif Kureishi ... The Last Word grippingly explores the point at which a real human being becomes a character. (Anita Sethi, Metro)

In the story's resolution, kindness, humanity and affection prevail and the last few pages touch a depth of feeling previously not seen. They are impossible to read without a lump in your throat. (John Harding, Daily Mail)

Writing for both Mamoon and Harry - and presumably Kureishi, too - is a visceral business and the patter between all the characters has a sharp edge. It is not so visceral, however, that Kureishi forgets to be thoroughly entertaining or steer his conversations with great variety and skill. Biography, as he notes, "is a process of disillusionment"; fiction though, as he shows here, can be every bit as perceptive but also much funnier. (Michael Prodger, New Statesman)

The Last Word is a highly spiced, tongue-in-cheek addition to the respectable subgenre pioneered by A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale and Penelope Lively's According to Mark - a novel about how a biography comes to be written, the pressures brought to bear on both biographee and anatomist, and the procedural difficulties that lie in wait along the way ... There are some splendid bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you jokes and Mamoon's titanic ego is deployed to considerable effect. (DJ Taylor, Literary Review)

Writing is the devil, Kureishi says here. The Last Word has devilry in abundance. Swiftian and Hogarthian, this would be gloomy reading, a tale of shattered communities and the imagination monetised, were it not for the delicious wickedness of the lampooning. (Chris Dolan, Herald)