Often dream-like but centred on the daily life of women... magnificent. - Guardian
Her lonely, fantasising women call up Rhys and Mansfield. - Hermione Lee, Observer
The stories here reveal a poetic imagination which combines the startling imagery of the surrealists with intensely female preoccupations . . . a singular, resonant voice. - Literary Review
These are the stories of a very gifted, very honest writer, who moves quite naturally between fidelity to fact and fidelity to the furnace beneath it, of memory and fantasy and bereavement. - TLS
Madeleine Bourdouxe is one of the more remarkable literary discoveries of the last few years. - Jonathan Coe
An unforgettable, thrilling achievement... What [Marie] does, no less, is stake a claim to Bourdouxhe's rightful position alongside Proust and Virginia Woolf as an explorer of interior life. - Sunday Times
A stunning collection... [Bourdouxhe] has the observational expertise and tightness in structure of Katherine Mansfield, a touch of Angela Carter's wildness, and the realism in her characterisation and dialogue reminded me of Daphne Du Maurier's later work... a moving, powerful and transformative reading experience. - The Heroine Collective
Exquisite, elegant, and nonsentimental... Bourdouxhe conveys the sharp, almost physical intensity of thought. - Irish Times on Marie
the laureate of yearning... [her] greatness lies in her ability to conjure the most exquisite and heart-rending moments from the most quotidian circumstances. Everyone should read her. - Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of His Bloody Project
Powerful stories... what a treat for modern readers to have her work revived. - A Life in Books blog
The surrealist soul of these stories is played with in both tragedy and comedy, and is frightfully good at bringing colour and electricity to the flat and the ordinary. - Books and Bao blog
There are not many writers you can think of who have understood the patriarchal situation with such clarity and disregarded it all the same with the exact proportionate amount of dignity, nihilistic abandon and fatalism. - Flowerville blog
Bourdouxhe's women have almost untold depths of feeling and trauma...But they are never bowed: they love, they mourn, they desire, they dream, they take risks. Above all, they never lose their sense of self. - Translating Women blog
I loved her writing, with its bare starkness. - Bookword blog
remarkable collection. Vivid... exquisite... stylish. - Book Jotter blog
A compact, yet challenging, piece of work... explores a variety of themes... continues to invoke debate and deliberation. - Swirl and Thread blog