Not just a book of the year but now one of my desert island books.
Adrian Turpin, Herald Scotland
Delicious and dead-on... All the embarrassments and gratifications of European travel are preserved in the amber of Maxwell's much pondered, seemingly casual prose.
New Yorker
As the voices of Austen, Turgenev and Tolstoy have survived, so will Maxwell's. There aren't many truly great writers among us. William Maxwell is one of them
The Times
It's hard not to see it as a work of genius
Times Literary Supplement
He combines educated intelligent and instinctive apprehension of human complexity in a way that would have earned Henry James' approval. William Maxwell is the very model of what a novelist should be
Independent on Sunday
Perennially endearing
Spectator
Surprising on every page... I ended The Château feeling very sad that it was over
Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life
Reading The Chateau is like meeting a very old friend with whom the conversation is always spontaneous, intimate, restorative and unpredictable
