The Blue Book

An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished... the writing is as taught and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all

Joan Bakewell, New Statesman

This is a masterful novel, imaginatively crafted, shaped by big, precisely articulated emotion

The Times

Kennedy is a fine stylist and single passages are exquisite

Financial Times

Offers the pleasures of a work in which form and content dovetail with extraordinary skill, and in which narrative tricks are utilised to enlarge on the theme of deception rather than for the sake of tricksiness itself

Edmund Gordon, Sunday Times

It displays all the verbal artistry and emotional force of its predecessor, burrowing deep into the minds of its intense central characters

Amber Pearson, Daily Mail

The more mysterious elements of the novel's structure...make the book a giddy pleasure

Anthony Cummins, Literary Review

An impressive novel

Keith Miller, Daily Telegraph

If you like Kennedy's work, with its cool wit, spare stylishness, sharp sense of place and world-worn tenderness, then you'll find all those attributes here

Keith Miller, Independent on Sunday

Always a bold writer, she observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness, sometimes verging on morbidity, is always leavened with wit and humour. She also writes beautifully

Guardian