An idiosyncratic and haunting novel: lush, slow-paced, sensual, metaphorical and, at the same time, anxiously worrying over the demands of kinship and the trail of history... This is a cultural historian's novel and the scholarly curiosity that went into Marina Warner's fine books of female myths and iconography makes here for a devotedly careful recreation

Warner's language and pace astonish and reward. Her characters, male and female, elderly and children, strike again and again the unexpected true note, whether playing, grieving, lusting, skinning fowl for dinner or complaining about politics

The Lost Father has all the pleasure of a literary crossword puzzle, combined with a brilliantly realised women's world... It is Warner's best novel so far

Marina Warner's fiction has a slow, dreamy quality that is at once pleasurable and slightly sinister... This is a moving book, and a very bookish one

Mythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. . . . The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice.

For ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 'As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance'