A wonderful book … This book is a delight … I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching, and agree wholeheartedly … All this makes Saunders's book very different from just another “how to” creative writing manual, or just another critical essay … One of the pleasures of this book is feeling his own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story

Tessa Hadley, Guardian

Saunders is such a wise and amiable teacher ... A page-turner

Robert Webb

Luminously perceptive

Guardian

A masterclass in how to be human ... unfailingly, often thrillingly illuminating … Published any time, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain would be a joyous reminder that fiction is “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised”. Published now, it feels like vital and civilising corrective to the pretend certainties of public life – and, increasingly, of our personal lives too

Telegraph

One of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of a writer that I've ever read

New York Times

The Russian greats truly shine in this account; but Saunders is the real star. His way of expressing himself is simultaneously supremely intellectual and jovially down-to-earth. It's rare to read a book and love it so much that you think it's simply perfect. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is that book

Viv Groskop, Spectator