It has captured the hearts, and fantasies, of generations of adolescents and lingered on their bookshelves, and in their souls, well into middle age...a tale of enchantment. It is, above all, a fairy tale, one imbued with the beauties of the French countryside, an eerie, charged nostalgia and all the yearnings of the budding Bohemian soul * Independent *
A bewitching tale of adolescence, love, adventure and the mysterious spaces in between * Sunday Times *
One of the most romantic, elegiac novels of adolescence ever written...resounds with not only the unfulfilled promise of the writer and his fictional alter ego but also that of a generation * Sunday Telegraph *
It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed * Spectator *
Intense, perfectly capturing that interval between childhood and the adult world -- Rosie Thomas
