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“... Chick-lit novelists have stuck with this style, and their books continue to sell. Finding Myself, Toby Litt’s pastiche of chick lit, leans heavily on the familiar model; the novel’s sassy, stuck-up narrator, Victoria About (pronounced ‘Abut’), cheerfully sticks to type. She is 32, tries to pass herself off as 29, counts the calories (‘think of ...”

“... has this month been reissued in English (Faber, £6.99), has a new rival. And I don’t mean Toby Litt, the John Calvin of the New Puritans, though the name of Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-land Busy also comes to mind, what with Litt’s latest 400-pager, deadkidsongs (Hamish Hamilton, £9.99) hitting the bookshops ...”

“... Leith’s Observer column, or the join-the-dots phrasing of a new and praised novelist like Toby Litt. What seems to be happening is a demotion of language: it is employed only for the carrying of information, with a nudge to the reader that the action is elsewhere, in the play of ideas beneath the bland words, in the overall notion of the ...”

“... to capture the pathos of self-delusion. There’s a much more sinister black humour at work in Toby Litt’s ‘The Puritans’, in which a couple making a fast buck copying porn films are unwittingly drawn into a dangerous situation. Litt makes the best of the minimalism imposed on him by achieving a bleak, nervy ...”