A bold and delightful novel, executed with energy and flair... Leela's Book is as much a meditation on tensions between brothers and sisters, or between parents and their children, as it is a rumination on the nature of storytelling. For a novel so thick in plot, and so lush with details of Indian life, it reads effortlessly. The result is magnificent

Leela's Book is a stimulating novel in which Albinia skilfully manages an intricate plot and an enormous, diverse cast of characters. Her immense historical acumen and sophisticated sense of culture have enabled her to craft a powerful tale

This is steeped in the tradition of the Indian epic, yet modern and vastly entertaining

Bold, playful, smart and lively

An epic, polyphonic juggernaut of a novel. Ambitious, skilfully plotted, and full of wonderful surprises. I was hooked from the very first page

A compelling tale that weaves together the profound and the playful, the modern and the traditional, the secular and the mythological - all the strands that make up today's India

Alice Albinia writes with tender acuity, and without illusions, of her characters' foibles. She brings that same unsparing, illuminating gaze to bear upon Delhi and India in this wise and lovely novel

A talent to look out for

Love, betrayal, war and peace charge this powerful debut

Tillyard writes in fluid, largely understated prose and her descriptions are wonderful

Tillyard is a fluent and attractive chronicler of detail and some of her imaginative liberties are ingenious

This saga of lives swept up in the Peninsular War recalls Georgette Heyer at her best...impossible to put down

A thrilling romance brought to life with exquisite detail

A prodigious talent able to combine meticulous research with novelistic devices...there is much to enjoy and admire

Fluently written and impeccably researched

Gripping

It is time we stopped thinking of the historical novel as a genre, and an inferior one at that. If its ostensible subject matter means that it doesn't attempt to tell us how we live now, nevertheless a novel set back in time may, if it is good, say as much about what it is to be alive as one set in the next street or another country today. Tides of War is such a novel. It is diverting, but not a diversion

A well written, engaging read...beautifully observed

A vivid account of a couple of years in the Peninsula Campaign and a sympathetic portrait of those left behind

A delicious novel by an experienced author who captures the scientific atmosphere of the early 19th century with a devastating study of infidelity

The real life players of the Napoleonic era spring to life

Compelling

Highly assured and almost educational with its broad sweep of history

Tillyard’s achievement is in this original portray log the Regency era and its relevance to our own time