Now at last a highly literate, deeply read cavalry officer shows one the nature of horse-borne warfare.

Mallinson's descriptions of what it's like to be on campaign are as compelling, vivid and plausible as in any war novel I've ever read.

[Mallinson is] the heir to Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forester

In Hervey, Mallinson has a character worthy of comparison with Forester's young Hornblower ... And as always there is a splendid backdrop of action.

Consistently inventive, evocative and uncompromising. Haunting is a word much overused, but Lark and Termite is exactly that: a novel whose elegant lingering images are hard to shake from the memory. This is a glowing, powerful and immensely readable paean to the power of family

Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original

An intense tale of love, loss and the bond of family that survive, almost miraculously, over time and space... What could have been a fairly conventional story... is transformed by Phillips into something extraordinary

'A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love'

Phillip's writing is distinctive, audacious and powerful

Remarkable. It is a strange and joyous book which will yield much to the patient reader

Lark and Termite, Phillips' fourth novel, has high expectations to live up to. That it meets, and even surpasses, such expectations is only one of its many achievements

'A richly textured novel with a wondrous story at its heart about the many permutations of love'

compulsive, innovative, challenging

A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love.

The voices and structures are remarkable

Tender story

With its almost mystical exploration of love in all its forms, this is a tender portrayal of a family that proves unsinkable

Phillips's characters...are alive and intimately rendered; their warmth suffuses the novel like low-burning embers

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned