This is a first-rate comic novel, and its lush characterization and language richly recommend it.

An anonymous review in The Athenaeum in 1859 praised it as a "novel of the highest class," and The Times called it "a first-rate novel."

An absolutely first-rate novel, also a critique of 'machismo' and filled with sensuous detail that revives a bygone era of life in Buenos Aires.

Thomas Mallon, whose first-rate novels ("Henry and Clara," "Dewey Defeats Truman") have often been positioned right beside important historical events, has wondered, too.

Cortazar --- Hopscotch and The Winners are first-rate novels.

The memoir reads like a first-rate novel.

Behind the pixilated swagger of Stephenson's prose, you catch frequent glimpses of the genuinely first-rate novel this might have been.

Last year our reviewer, Rosemary Herbert, praised this "first-rate" novel for "brilliant touches that effectively blend contemporary understanding of character with a Victorian sensibility."

My view is that the great literary masterpieces always lose through adaptation; it's what you might call first-rate novels of the second rank that invariably gain.

A family remembrance that "reads like a first-rate novel," by a book critic for The Washington Post.