Press Reviews

• Telegraph

  Beautifully written and observed, and an interesting representation of the ideas of and pressures upon a generation of intellectual women immediately after the Great War

• Margaret Drabble

  Lehmann has always written brilliantly of women in love, of mothers and daughters

• The Times

  The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers

• Jonathan Coe

  It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read

• Spectator

  This is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time

• Sunday Times

  It is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation . . . The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art

• Elizabeth Jane Howard

  [Lehman] is immensely readable, acute, passionate, funny and original

• Atlantic

  Whoever loves the earth, and especially whoever loves English earth, will drink delicious draughts from this book; for not only beauty, but the ache of beauty, is alive in it

• Harriet Lane

  Independent

  Lehmann's story is both universal and deliciously particular, like all the best coming-of-age stories. No one has written more brilliantly about having one's heart broken, about despair and longing, humiliation and hope: all the wretched thrilling chaos that accompanies growing up. Finding it at fifteen felt a little like stumbling upon magic. Miraculously, all these years and re-readings later, it still has that effect on me

• THE TIMES

  The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers

• Jonathan Coe

  It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read