MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The supernatural elements ultimately distract from the broader ecofictional design ... More powerful is the novel’s sobering final vision, a rebuke to our irrepressible and destructive egocentrism.
Maggie O'Farrell
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)... elegant and gripping ... O’Farrell’s resolution to the poem’s central mystery is apt and cleverly plotted, and the novel is tautly suspenseful as we watch Lucrezia, caged and endangered like the tigress, seek to escape its deadly fate. Like Maggie O’Farrell’s previous novel, Hamnet (2020), The Marriage Portrait is immersive, evocative, revisionist historical fiction, light of touch and rich in texture. Lovers of Browning’s poem will appreciate the little allusive gems she has scattered throughout.
Sarah Moss
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement... [a] subtly chilling new novel ... the brevity of Ghost Wall itself is deceptive about the novel’s scope. On one level a taut personal drama about a young girl and her abusive father, Ghost Wall is also a sharp political critique of the way distortions of the past ratify hatred and oppression in the present ... Though Ghost Wall is pointed and timely about the toxic effects of nativism, misogyny and xenophobia, its impact is dramatic, not didactic. Silvie’s narrating voice is at once engagingly frank and disconcertingly vulnerable: even as we relish the rebellious urges she mostly holds in check, we come to share her habitual dread of their consequences. By entangling us so closely with Silvie’s individual plight, Moss leads us deftly towards more radical insights; in hoping for Silvie’s liberation, we are also fighting back against insidious narratives that seem all too powerful in our own world today.
