RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)An elegant little book ... There’s constant pleasure in slipping into this stranger’s memories. Fans of her crime books will particularly enjoy spotting how doors of perception were opened in her life ... Some memories and observations shade into the banal ... It’s as much a mood as a book, full of nutritious darkness and the poignancy of winter memory. The Scottish bits are the most arresting, but all the travels have a rough wintry glamour about them. It is almost a pity to get to the end, the first snowdrops barging through along a Devon lane.
Siân Evans
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)\"... wonderfully readable ... Evans’s prologue deftly builds us a ship ... Piquant or squalid details provide a startling metaphor for insouciant social inequality ... The story is invigoratingly feminist ... engaging ... The book’s a treat. It’s staying on my shelf.
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Judith Flanders
PositiveThe Times (UK)... a library and academic essential rather than a catchpenny popular read (that, by the way, is a compliment). Her \'curious history of alphabetical order\' becomes a history of all writing, of libraries, of academe, of the way that, as knowledge and ideas develop, everyone — human, divine, the god Ganesh using his tusk as a pen — realises that for posterity’s sake things must be findable ... [a] huge whirlwind of odd and arcane information.
Chris Atkins
PositiveThe Times (UK)... lively ... The shock-horror of being a middle-class man in prison is well evoked ... Given he was sentenced in 2016, the book’s serious use is in its topicality ... He pinpoints known problems such as illiteracy and smuggled smartphones (everyone seemed to have one) and the absurdity of regulations
