An amazing, hilarious and unfalteringly entertaining account of a man trapped in a kin of Catch-23.

Takes you by the shoulders and shakes you until your teeth rattle.

Cunningly, relentlessly jokey and sad.

A laureate of American low life.

A brilliant debut

First-rate

In a wonderful, lively, insightful and heartbreaking love story, Harper allows Shakespeare's secret wife, Anne Whateley, to narrate her colorful, lusty story. With her sharp eye for detail and dialogue, Harper delivers a tale that resounds with the colour and atmosphere of life in the theatre, London and the intrigues that ran rampant in England

Witty enough to make you laugh out loud, but there are moments of real emotion that keep the book from being too light

A superb ear for dialogue...wonderfully comic

Riotously high in laughs and glamour. I defy a festive grump not to be cheered by it

Fast-paced and funny

Influenced by magical realism and the cool prose of modernism, first-time author Chloe Aridjis takes the best from each