«Of all the contemporary novelists who are compared to Dickens, Susan Hill probably has the best claim....Hill has produced another perfectly controlled work of fiction... What is striking about the best of Hill's fiction...is her almost Bachian ability to plumb the depths of emotion and bring the reader back out again»

Amanda Craig, Prospect

«Hill impresses without seeking to astonish, and so is one of those rare writers whose work is brilliant in the single, secondary sense- not glittering, but distinguished- her prose as pleasing and surprising, say, as a perfectly round stone, or home-cooked haute cuisine»

Ian Sansom, Guardian

«Hill's writing here is superb, conveying emotion and pain in the sparest of prose...a comforting keenly moving tale of endurance and the eternal springs of friendship and love»

Philip Womack, Literary Review

«It has a power beyond its pages; a haunting resonance between each stark sentence that stayed with me long after I'd turned the final page.The delicate balance between kindness and bitterness, hope and despair, a dying man and a dying town, are almost unbearably poignant. This is a short book that will live long in the memory»

Rebecca Armstrong, Independent on Sunday

«Concisely captures primal emotions and offers astonishing transformations... Movingly perceptive»

David Grylls, Sunday Times