A highly enjoyable read: well-informed, gripping...an overview of the period seen from the underside

Not only is the background of social and political change meticulously accurate...but there is everything one would expect from a well-kept diary. This is fiction: yet it is true

A beautifully crafted novel about the cost of war... Forster is as distinguished a biographer and memoir-writer as she is a novelist. She is an old hand at making a story out of the fragments of a life

We believe in Millicent whole-heartedly and come to love her - she has a heroism that George Eliot would recognise. It may be fiction, but it's also - convincingly, tragically and often exhilaratingly - real life

A richly textured, skilfully structured and highly enjoyable novel by an experienced writer at the peak of her powers

No woman could have been more liberated than Millicent King, whose story Margaret Forster tells in this excellent novel - less a novel than a chronicle of events experienced by a token ordinary woman, who is in fact not so much ordinary as iconic

A new work by Margaret Forster always gives me a tingle of anticipation. Her books are consistently good reads, packed with originality and imagination

Always convincing and utterly compulsive

This is a remarkable novel. Forster evokes a woman and a century with faultless clarity. She also makes us question how we know the past, each other and ourselves

Diary of an Ordinary Woman is certainly more gripping and more immediate than many novels...Forster has pulled off an imaginative feat

Wonderfully comic and touching

Interweaves a variety of thoroughly imagined life stories and predicaments with quiet, effective skill

I have greater admiration for Margaret Forster than for most novelists. A very fine, continuously interesting, and often moving work, all the better because it is so firmly rooted in the ordinary world of everyday experience

At times witty and enchanting, on other occasions full of doubt and self-loathing, Merivel remains a stunning achievement. He is Everyman and speaks to us all

Exuberance is a very hard thing to sustain in a novel… However, Tremain brings it off brilliantly. As one might expect, this is a very funny novel, full of picaresque adventure, hapless accidents and ingeniously wrought slapstick. However, it is also a very moving and beautiful novel. There are passages here which I found myself reading over and over again simply in order to savour them. Merivel: A Man of His Time may have been a long time coming, but it’s been well worth the wait

Merivel is excellent company. Writing with a mimic’s ear for conversation, whimsical one moment, grave the next, Tremain has an underlying preoccupation here: the last third of live, love and loss, loneliness and vanity

Tremain writes beautifully about Reniassance England but it’s the glittering paradoxes of Merivel’s character that here leap fully formed from the page

Tremain’s novel experiments continually with light and shade – she expertly paints a picture with three dimensions and real feeling

Merivel offers a rich and satisfying sequel to the bright beginning of Restoration

More interesting than all the period decoration is the character of Merivel, a character whom the author has such deep knowledge of. Tremain’s fusion of an engrossing character and the minutiae of another time is a marvel

Tremain's control of her character and her reflective but often dramatic unfolding of events are impressive acts of authorial ventriloquism, in which she gives a nod to the great diarists of that era but carries off her own man's story with wit, grace and originality. There is only to add that, despite the linear storytelling imposed on a journal, she not only effortlessly sustains momentum and mood, but brings the novel to as near a perfect ending as one could wish

Tremain is particularly good at exploring the nuances of life for the hapless Merivel so that reader empathises with his sense of loneliness and despair. As well as exploring the sensitive side of Merivel’s character we share his intimate thoughts which are often very funny. A beautiful book

A delightful portrait of an aging man at the mercy of his own foibles and frustrations

Sequels rarely live up to their predecessors but this one comes close

A glorious book of heart-warming philosophy and heart-rending sadness

An excellent novel...thrilling reading...incredibly entertaining

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today

Vivid, original and always engaging

Rose Tremain writes comedy that can break your heart

Steps inside the mind of Sir Robert Merivel

For a second time this is one to cherish

A Pepysian romp of the first order

Continues in the same superior vein as Restoration… The fusion of such an engrossing character, and the minutiae of another time, remains a marvel

In this evocative and beautifully drawn novel of family and loyalty in the face of an uncertain future Tremain continues the story of a wonderfully unique character

Hugely enjoyable

Merivel’s hapless charm remains intact in this tour de force of literary technique

A sequel that looks back to the earlier novel without ever quite recapturing its spirit is the perfect form in which to evoke that feeling of having to carry on, and of trying to make yourself have fun even with it eventually begins to hurt

A marvelllously rollicking good read, and it is such a pleasure to meet Robert Merivel again. Rose Tremain brings the character to life in a way that makes you want to find out even more about the period. Enormously skilled and deft