RaveThe London Review of BooksIn Pericles, Antiochus’ daughter is locked in an incestuous relationship with her father...The daughter is given no name, and only two bland lines that hint at a desire for escape. Haddon reverses this neglect, to riveting effect: he takes the flickering, near silent presence of Antiochus’ daughter and makes her the source of his narrative ... we realise (though the metafictional framing is lightly done) that Angelica is telling or imagining the story we are reading of Darius- transformed-into-Pericles, and that the silenced, shamed daughter of Antiochus, whom Wilkins and Shakespeare never liked, has become, in Haddon’s Angelica, the teller of the tale she conceives as both a version and a counter-version of her own traumatic life. Haddon conveys all this with startling granularity ... Haddon’s novel creates, throughout, a looming sense that something very bad but not quite perceptible is in the process of unfolding: a terrible half-glimpsed fate that the characters are powerless to resist.
