The Pumpkin Eater

A strange, fresh, gripping book. One of the the many achievements of The Pumpkin Eater is that it somehow manages to find universal truths in what was hardly an archetypal situation: Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy, so that what we're asked to look at is frequently red-raw and painful without being remotely self-dramatizing. In fact, there's a dreaminess to some of the prose that is particularly impressive, considering the tumult that the book describes

Nick Hornby

Mortimer's style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel ... Will Penguin's new edition of The Pumpkin Eater encourage people to look again at Mortimer? I hope so. She is so good. I can't think of a writer more attentive to emotional weather

Rachel Cooke, The Observer

One of those novels which seem to be written with real knowledge of the brink of the abyss, taut almost beyond endurance

The Sunday Times

A seriously good writer

Telegraph

A subtle, fascinating, unhackneyed novel... in touch with human realities and frailties, unsentimental and amused... So moving, so funny, so desperate, so alive... [A] fine book, and one to be greatly enjoyed

The New York Times

In this, her best book, Mortimer employs a steely, sceptical firm-eyed prose, which pays readers the compliment of regarding them almost as collaborators

Guardian

The themes in this short novel are timeless. There are lessons here for us all

The Times