Acknowledged as one of the best novelists of her generation...Beryl's literary fiction can have a quality of a detective story: only when we reach a novel's final denouement do we see that we were given the key to its coded mystery at the start. A certain menace emanates from a story's first page and builds almost imperceptibly to its climax in a refined but savage violence * Guardian *
Vintage bitter-sweet Bainbridge * Mail on Sunday *
Imagine Priestley's The Good Companions as written by Gogol and you will have some idea of the mixture of waggish humour and sordid pathos in Bainbridge's novel * Sunday Times *
A subtle schizophrenic insight into adult relationships ... Bainbridge's understated prose and obsessive eye for the smallest and most telling of details have never been better employed * Time Out *
A Booker Prize nominee, Bainbridge's latest novel is a compelling read...In Stella Bradshaw, a teenage aspiring actress from the slums of Liverpool, Bainbridge limns a tough but beguiling character. She also deftly conveys the atmosphere of 1950s England, still grimly bomb-cratered, coping with food rationing and the visible casualties of maimed veterans. Her portrait of a seedy repertory troupe, whose members histrionically indulge in love affairs and unrequited passions, is classic...Her innocent but dangerous impulses and her crush on Meredith, whose homosexuality eludes her, makes Stella a sort of Typhoid Mary of psychological injury; one after another, members of the troupe suffer from her impetuous behavior. Bainbridge's prose brims with pithy insights tinged with sardonic humor, and her plot moves swiftly to a chilling conclusion * Publishers Weekly *
Vintage bittersweet Bainbridge * MAIL ON SUNDAY *
Imagine Priestley's THE GOOD COMPANIONS as written by Gogol and you will have some idea of the mixture of waggish humour and sordid pathos in Bainbridge's novel * SUNDAY TIMES *
A subtle schizophrenic insight into adult relationships ... Bainbridge's understated prose and obsessive eye for the smallest and most telling of details have never been better employed * TIME OUT *
