A great literary novel but also the most erotic book ever written -- Jonathan Dee * Financial Times * 'A Sport and a Pastime . . . Slender, cynical and bruisingly sexy, the novel represents the first full flowering of [Salter's] mature style; his exquisite sentences and extraordinary evocation of place. Daily Telegraph 'Now deemed canonical . . . A Sport and a Pastime [is] still one of the most intensely honest books about sexual passion.' Sunday Times A tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliffhanger * New York Times * He has written three books that everyone should read before they die: A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and his recollections, Burning the Days * Independent * 'Two of his previous novels [including] A Sport and a Pastime, from 1967, are regarded as classics . . . The writer Reynolds Price also thought A Sport and a Pastime "perfect",' Irish Times One of the finest American writers of his mighty generation * Esquire * He has written three books that everyone should read before they die: A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years and his recollections, Burning the Days * Independent * Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . He can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence * Washington Post * A Sport and a Pastime is as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know -- Reynolds Price James Salter's writing has always provoked in me a kind of evangelical admiration. It is sheer brute magic. His prose is exquisite, sentences created with such acuity and efficacy it seems he re-forges language itself, makes it more purposeful and beautiful -- Sarah Hall Robert Frost said that the hope of any poet is to lodge a few poems so deep they couldn't be dislodged, and James Salter has done that again and again. He has become an indelible presence in our literature -- Tobias Wolff * Observer * To read Salter's work is always to embark on a journey through a life lived - the beautiful and the colourless, the tragic and the sustaining . . . exceptional fiction that cuts to our most cherished and at times most private truths. Read him when you can, his novels about sex and flying and war and love - those moments that should outshine all others - and your own world, your own moments worth remembering will appear all the brighter for it * GQ *