Just thinking of this novel, I smile... so gratifyingly readable. When it comes to deciphering our new world and its emotional intricacies, Fonseca is spot-on

A searing tale of middle-aged anxiety, so accomplished and pertinent, witty and wise

Fonseca possesses a wonderful eye and vocabulary for the observable world, a natural gift for portraiture and a nasty wit about characters we're not supposed to like... All is perfectly suited to her complex subject, one worth taking seriously: the difficulty of loving someone you already love, and its corollary, the stony impenetrability of others

An impressive debut...it is insistent, weighty, carefully and densely composed....this is an adult book in all respects, reflecting, with an inquiring intelligence and emotional honesty

She has an expressive turn of phrase and a gift for evoking a sense of place

Attachment faces the uncomfortable subject of female ageing with wry, disabused humour...read her book on its own feminist terms'

Fonseca's prose is fluent, confident and often funny ... she has a gift for satire that glimmers through this novel. And a near-perfect ear for nuances of speech. Attachment is ferociously well observed. Both physiologically and socially ... as a first novel, the signs of greater things are clearly there

Fonseca's voice - poised, particular, exotic - rises above her plot

Her prose is elegant and wry

Fonseca's talent lies in describing the texture of daily life: the mango with a 'skin like sunset', the pizza boxes that open 'like laptops' ... she is good on the sweep of history and the cultural climate of previous times ... telling details of character - particularly the male characters, are captured well

Isabel Fonseca's slinkily assured debut novel shows a wry appreciation of the complexities of modern love...a novel that presumes to put a woman's mid-life crisis - sexual, spiritual and intellectual - centre stage

Involving novel

this smart, clammy drama, manages to be both unsettling and touching

Fabulous and very clever

A witty exploration of the preoccupations of middle age - sex, serious illness, the death of a parent - its main attraction being the voice, at once tough, funny and lonely, of the inimitable Jean.

Fonesca's debut novel is a funny, heart rendering account of the virtues of love and desire, confounded against the everyday.

With its unflinching look at treatments of madness, and its authentic period feel, this is an appropriately disturbing, while also beautifully written, story of human endeavour - and human failure.

Chosen in The New Yorker Books of the year 2010: 'An intricate homage to two nineteenth-century poets'.

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

The greatest comic writer ever

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

Sublime comic genius

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour