The Bell

She's writing about the only things that matter - love, goodness and how to be happy -- Patrick Gale * Independent *
The plot is both comical and moving, and it's a book that everyone who's ever been tempted to throw in the towel and become a hermit should read....despite the grand subjects at issue, the novel's tone is not at all dry or didactic - it is, on the contrary, wonderfully lively and poignant at the same time, tender with a sprightly social comedy reminiscent of PG Wodehouse and Barbara Pym -- Guardian
Her characters are described with loving exactitude and in such depth that their struggles to define what it means to live a good life take on dramatic force * New York Times *
How bloody good her novels are - how intelligent, how lucent, how divinely crazy. They're fun - I'd forgotten that -- Sarah Waters * Guardian *
Above all, she was a consummate story-teller, prodigiously inventive and generous, in the realist tradition of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky * Independent *