From the viewpoint of Elizabeth Wilson... lady's maid, Margaret Forster retells the love story of Robert and Elizabeth Browning...Enthralling

Compulsively readable... at each climax of the story, from the Browning's runaway romance to her own equally compromised and complicated marriage, the lady's maid speaks directly and at the last most movingly

Passion, melodrama, pathos - and a happy ending. What more can you ask for?

Movingly told... Wilson's pleasures, losses and disappointments in love are complicated and excellently understated, imagined as a contrast to the grand passions she has to serve

Accomplished, beautifully written... packed with discreet domestic detail

Fact and fiction are skilfully interwoven-beautifully done

Uncompromisingly direct.

Another dispatch from dysfunctional suburbia by one of the US’s hottest writers…A morbid fascination with the family’s eye-poppingly vicious interactions keeps you turning the pages…It’s hard to forget.

David Vann has a talent for being able to pack a lot into very few words - and to make them all effective and forceful. ...compelling. If I start reading Vann I know that I'm going to have to keep reading no matter how painful, how distressing the story...what marks this book out as being something special is the forensic examination of the tipping point at which a disturbed mind, an unfocused mind tumbles into madness.

A powerful story of a family on the verge of imploding, David Vann's novel might not be an easy read - but it is, undoubtedly, a book you will want to devour in a single sitting.

Dirt’s basic set-up , a lone parent and a child locked together in unhealthy co-dependency, is reminiscent of southern tales by Flannery O’Connor, John Kennedy Toole and Tennessee Williams. And while Galen’s religious obsessions align Dirt more with O’Connor or Toole, it’s Williams’s world that the novel is otherwise closest to: the unforgiving, brain-invading heat; the incessant family squabbling; the autocratic patriarch (dead, but still looming in this case); the over-devoted mother; the furtive, incest-like relationship; and the failed, trapped central character, nevertheless convinced of his special gifts and destiny.

What Vann does so well is to take recognisably ordinary characters and put them in critical situations, where tiny decisions or actions have life-altering outcomes. This is what gives his books their nightmarish quality -- the feeling that these events could happen to anyone.

I found it impossible to put down. I read it over a couple of rushed afternoons and found myself gasping for air…Days later I still couldn’t get Galen’s voice – that distinctive blend of mocking, vulnerable and cruel – out of my head…It [Dirt] is both brilliant and painful; comic and disturbing; full of despair about humanity and moments of warmth; deranged and beautifully executed.

Vann's writing is vivid and shocking, and his imagination is extraordinary.

Vann presents us with a pitch perfect rendering of the everyday problems of family life, while simultaneously depicting an outlandish and horrifying battle between son, mother and aunt.

Bodice-ripping romp through the West

Missy by Strong and memorable female characters throughout this enjoyable novel