'Grabs from the get-go... as if this were the very best fiction'
- Daily Mail
'A brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history'
- Daily Telegraph
'Frightening but hopelessly addictive'
- The Times
'Magisterial... chilling'
- Daily Express
'Brilliantly told... compelling... Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides describing them in dramatic, almost hour by hour detail... this is a scary book. Hastings sees little evidence that today's leaders understand each other any better than they did in 1962'
- Sunday Times
'Deeply researched, incisively intelligent and compulsively readable. Abyss is as tight and smart account as any account and will earn pride of place even on a shelf already packed with books about the crisis'
- TLS
'A gripping retelling of those weeks of brinkmanship, reckless gambles, gung-ho generals and a thuggish USSR leader bullying a 'weak president''
- Sun
'Superb... reads like a thriller as the gripping drama of the Cold War power politics plays out behind closed doors in Washington, Moscow and Havana'
- Daily Mail
'Hastings lays bare, with chilling clarity, the ease with which political theatre and bluster could well have escalated into a scenario of mutually assured destruction'
- Observer