In this darkly funny work, Parks offers a story that doesn’t shy away from the complexity of relationships, and from the ineffability, indeed, impossibility, of the unmade decision.

Mordantly amusing, deeply sad novel… Plainly written, vivid portrait of a marriage… A cautionary tale for couples heedless of the care and kindness a good relationship requires, and a horror story for those who discover they are simply but irreparably mismatched.

A blackly comic study of a 30-year-old marriage.

As effective an antidote to Valentine’s Day as you could find.

Restless, lightly mordant tale of lust and love lost.

A subtle and painfully well-observed black comedy that will make some readers flinch with recognition.

This forensic account of marital breakdown is breathtakingly honest… There are moments in Thomas and Mary…that will make anyone in a long-term relationship wince.

Parks’s observations of family life are warm and funny.

A serious and penetrating study, always drilling down to the fundamentals, of family, love and middle-aged ennui.

Witty and pleasantly asymmetric.

It’s a poignant portrait, like stained glass; a rich picture made up of all the small stories that make up a marriage, that make up a life.

Tim Parks is a writer with acute perception of human nature.

Tim Parks, always sharp on domestic details… is good on the subtleties of office politics. And good on stormy passion, too.

Peyton Marshall is a writer of intelligence and keen observation with a great future. GOODHOUSE is a startling debut. In James, she has created a compelling and convincing hero for the all-too-probable dark times ahead

An eerie, compelling novel, its deceptively simple language is a 'slight rush of words' which hold much more than they seem capable of containing...This novel is about the need to create a story we can live with when the real story cannot be told...

Strout uses a different voice herself in this novel: a spare simple one, elegiac in tone that sometimes brings to mind Joan Didion's

This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it

An exquisitely written story...a brutally honest, absorbing and emotive read

Honest, intimate and ultimately unforgettable

Sympathetic, subtle and sometimes shocking

Plain and beautiful...Strout writes with an extraordinary tenderness and restraint

One of this year's best novels: an intense, beautiful book about a mother and a daughter, and the difficulty and ambivalence of family life

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz

Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is the best novel I've read for some time

An exquisite novel of careful words and vibrating silences

In this quiet, well observed novel, a mother and her mysteriously ill daughter rebuild their relationship in a New York hospital room. Deft and tender, it lingers in the mind

A worthy follow-up to Olive Kitteridge

I loved My Name is Lucy Barton: she gets better with each book

The standout novel of the year - a visceral account of the relations between mother and daughter and the unreliability of memory

In a brilliant year for fiction, I've admired the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton shouldn't work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge

A rich account of a relationship between mother and daughter, the frailty of memory and the power of healing

This physically slight book packs an unexpected emotional punch

A novel offering more hope

My Name Is Lucy Barton intrigues and pierces with its evocative, skin-peeling back remembrances of growing up dirt-poor.

Masterly