Resonant, beautiful and often very funny... Eva is triumphantly real, a creation of great imaginative tenderness

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the handful of great English novelist of this century and must be ranked beside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Ford Madox Ford

Eva is the larger-than-life, some would say monstrous, culmination of a subject that haunted Bowen's work: the neglected, or misplaced, child

I still remember the electrifying effect it had upon me when it was published in 1969. At various stages of life I have become almost possessed by it... The book shimmers with life in every paragraph

A subtle, elusive novel making its mysterious way forward by side glances and half-gleams, by sudden small illuminations and half-hidden ironies, by a tenderness that is half-mocking and a mockery that is half-tender

Exhibits extraordinary originality

Saramago can transform banal sentiments into unexpected profundities

Earle seems to have little trouble expanding his range from a three-minute song to a 300-page narrative... And though the novel comes no closer to establishing the facts of Hank Williams's death, it certainly reveals a good deal of truth behind it

A witty, heartfelt story of hope, forgiveness and redemption