How it works

Every critic's verdict, in one place

Review Books gathers the reviews that Britain's newspapers and literary magazines publish about each new book, so you can see at a glance what the critics thought and then read the reviews that interest you.

Where the reviews come from

We follow the book pages of the national papers and the leading literary and current-affairs magazines. When a new book is reviewed, we look for every other review of the same book from the outlets we track, and add them as they appear. The list of outlets is on the critics page.

How a verdict is read

Each review is placed in one of four groups, rave, positive, mixed or pan, from the outlet's own headline and published summary. Where that summary does not show the critic's view (common with paywalled reviews), we mark it verdict not stated and leave it out of the score rather than guess. The score is simply how many of the critics with a stated verdict were positive.

Quotes and links

The quotes are the outlets' own words, short, credited and taken from their headline or summary, and every review links to the full piece on the outlet's site. We never reproduce whole reviews.

What we will never do

We do not write reviews of books we have not read, invent quotes, or accept payment to include, exclude or position a book. If a verdict here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the review.