A gentle and completely absorbing read.

This is an impressive debut, holding your interest with characters that are comprehensively and sympathetically drawn.

Pam Ayres is a poet for the people. Her verse portrays a wicked sense of humour, and deals with subjects not normally thought to be worthy of poetry

Pam Ayres, the bestselling poet, writes as rhapsodically about the Wonderbra as Wordsworth did about daffodils

There are clear comparisons between Pam and Sir John Betjeman

The genius Pam Ayres

One of Britain's greatest poets

One of the best accounts of clever English schoolboyhood I've read

Flighty, playful… Barnes succeeds in vividly recreating teenage precociousness, particularly what it feels like to be a young male encountering love and sex

A dazzling entertainer

Consummately elegant

He writes perceptively about the shift from self-absorbed teenager to adult.

If all works of fiction were as thoughtful, as subtle, as well constructed and as funny as Metroland there would be no more talk of the death of the novel

It's one of the best accounts of clever English schoolboyhood I've read

Irony and imagery are deployed with a finesse even Flaubert wouldn't wince at...consummately elegant

Sinister, shocking and extremely powerful

Wonderful

Her writing is always thrilling and this is much more than simply a page-turner

A successful novel, well made and written with a light touch

It is beautifully written, and elegantly edited, and manages to pack in vivid characterisations built on tragic family histories... With its strong structure and interesting themes, it could be a textbook example of how to write a modern novel

Satisfying death-blow to place-in-the-sun escapism

A compelling novel

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

Creepily affecting

Chilling and vivid

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

Intriguing

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller