RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)... comes with an unexpected 21st-century sensibility so that it feels modern rather than homage-like and is bursting with energy and zip ... Honestly, I want to sound a trumpet and put out some flags. It is pure heaven from first word to last. It’s a debut novel, incredibly for something so assured and fully realised, although it did take the author something like ten years to write ... There are scandals and affairs, heartbreak, longing, a brilliant description of the long, slow fade of love based on desire, and a devastating explanation of why Jasper is as he is. (I have never read a more moving description of how and why a sweet little boy might turn into a pompous prig. Quinn is superb at explaining broken hearts of all types, and hearts generally) ... Quinn’s writing throughout is . . . the word I keep coming back to is \'generous\'. It’s as though she had made the reader the most lavish and delicious cake, with layers of cream and so much fruit that it spills out on to the plate. Although a cake perhaps suggests a cloying sweetness. There is no cloying; this is lucid storytelling. Here is the world, Quinn seems to say, in all its glory and misery, its tiny little joys and its great dollops of pain — all of it valuable and there for the taking, to make of what you will ... one of those books that has you hooting with laughter one minute (although the laughter is never unkind, which is a whole other skill; you never snigger) and feeling absolutely floored the next, not just because of the meanderings of the plot or Quinn’s acute emotional intelligence, but because she is one of those writers who has her finger on humanity’s pulse. An absolute treat of a book, to be read and reread.
Katherine Heiny
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)There are some rare books that feel like nibbling on the prettiest, most delicious biscuit. It’s only when you finish them, eking out the last few chapters because you don’t want to waste a single precious crumb, that you realise the biscuit was in fact a protein-packed three-course meal, and an exceptionally satisfying one — nourishment for life. The only reason you didn’t think this from the start is that the book was so intensely funny that you mistook its lightness for a lack of depth ... Katherine Heiny’s hard-to-top previous novel, Standard Deviation, was one such book, and to my mind one of the best, and funniest, novels of the past ten years. Her new one, Early Morning Riser, is perhaps even better ... about the nature of all kinds of love, about the deep pleasures and frequent exasperations of small-town life, about the joys and frustrations of families and domesticity, and about what, in the end, constitutes happiness. It is such a rich novel, each character neon-vivid and exquisitely drawn, with as much care lavished on the bit-part players as on the main performers ... Heiny also excels at writing small children and the scenes involving Jane’s classroom are cry-makingly funny ... weighty, tender, astute, more funny than I know how to describe and, in places, profoundly sad — Heiny can break your heart in one sentence. It takes the tiny stuff of everyday life and makes it big and meaningful. Quiet things become loud. You put the book down and feel glad to be alive.
Selina Hastings
RaveThe Times (UK)This is such a fantastic read ... Hastings’s delicious biography, with its abundance of intricate and intimate detail, is total heaven ... the material is so very rich ... There were many sexual bondings and relationships throughout Bedford’s long life, each fascinatingly detailed here ... I can’t express how wonderful [Bedford\'s] novels are, or this biography, which brings a fundamentally shy and private woman out into the light and is populated by the sorts of people who don’t seem to exist any more—madly clever, slightly louche, culturally omnivorous, sexually fluid, crisscrossing Europe and each other in search of fun and new ideas.
