'Extraordinary. . . Underworld is a rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department - dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest. . . In Underworld we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers. Reading the book is a charged and thrilling aesthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form - it gets the human condition' William Boyd, Observer