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 * The Times * 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 -- Harriet Lane * Independent * 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 * Telegraph * [ Lehman] is immensely readable, acute, passionate, funny and original -- Elizabeth Jane Howard 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 * Sunday Times * Lehmann has always written brilliantly of women in love, of mothers and daughters -- Margaret Drabble It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read -- Jonathan Coe This is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time * Spectator * 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 * Atlantic * 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 * THE TIMES * It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read * Jonathan Coe *
