(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

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TIM LOTT:
It's a far better book than White Teeth. No doubt about that at all. Because of its crispness and brevity. There is much less padding in it. It gets to the point and moves along at a great pace.

She clearly loves Martin Amis and owes him a debt. It's the sort of a book that Martin Amis never wrote. She doesn't have his malice and cruelty. There is a real tenderness in her writing. She likes her characters and she makes you likes her characters.

There is enormous wit and insight in her writing. It owes a little to Kurt Vonnegut I think. There is a kind of musing tendency there and little drawings there and illustrations that interrupt it. She clearly loves American writing and that is her main influence.

I thought it was a triumph. I hope it wins the Booker.

WILLIAM FEAVER:
There are a lot of cleverness in there, which maybe by the product of fear and uncertainty and nervousness.

It's a terrific follow-up and probably better than the first-half of White Teeth. The problem with the book is that the characters have characteristics rather than character. I do think you cannot visualise them.

I'd compare her with early Dickens and say this is maybe her Pickwick Papers. But at the same time, there is this extraordinary lack which I think a bit more editing might have helped.

BONNIE GREER:
Her secondary characters are brilliant. I love the scenes in the auction house. I love Honey, the black American woman. But her authorial voice is too much mid-Atlantic. She will have one phrase "hunker down" and in the next place she will have lift.

The fatal killer blow is that Alex, the central character is for me not alive yet. He doesn't sound like a guy to me. He doesn't sound like a woman to me.

Kitty is another problem. Kitty is the icon we are supposed to be following. She is not big enough. She is a very good character but she is not the end of a quest.

This is a novel of ideas, not just a funny little book about warm people. She wants us to think about fame and she is not up to that yet.

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