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Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
Nov 28, 2025 5:19 PM

Author:Ruth Padel

Rembrandt Would Have Loved You

Ruth Padel's passionate new collection is a woman's eye view of a love affair, with darker undercurrents of mortality and loss. Shifting between vulnerability and guilt, innocence and doubt, tenderness and frustration, teasing reproach and the exaltation of deep love and sexual happiness, Padel's extraordinarily bold and intimate book explores the complexity of emotions that go with falling in love.

Wonderfully versatile in tone, it blends the lyrical and the colloquial, formality and wit, myth and the Spice Girls. It includes the poem that won the 1996 National Poetry Competition 'Icicles round a tree in Dumfriesshire'.

Reviews

An intense and sensitive sequence of poems

—— Independent

Her poems are delicate but with an unusual delicacy

—— The Times

Sexy love poetry

—— Guardian

A daring blend of fire and ice, passion and design

—— Jo Shapcott

Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

—— Angela Carter

A novel of fine artistry and stark emotional truth - full of our darkest currents and faintest sounds

—— The Times

A writer to read and reread

—— Economist

Beautifully written and bitterly funny

—— Financial Times

Caribou Island is a scant 300 pages, and written in prose as pellucid as the rivers he used to fish as a boy. But it says so much: about men and women, about marriage, about the desperate gap between who we want to be and who we are

—— Observer

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

—— Literary Review

Captivating... Like a beloved granny's visit, we're a little bit sorry to see the end approaching

—— Irish Times

This rich novel, full of pathos, concerns the unbridgeable gaps between generations

—— Daily Telegraph

Faulks's most vivid character is the odious John Veals, a hedge-fund manager, who relishes all the money that he makes and the power that he quietly exerts... Veals is brilliantly insidious... A thoughtful page-turner... The handsome sunset is heavily, and rightly, weighed down by dark clouds

—— The Times

A tragedy at sea, a miracle on paper... Moore offers us, elegantly, exultantly, the very consciousness of her characters. In this way, she does more than make us feel for them. She makes us feel what they feel, which is the point of literature and maybe even the point of being human.

—— Globe and Mail

This mesmerising book is full of tears, and is a graceful meditation on how to survive life's losses

—— Marie Claire

Fans of Anita Shreve and Anne Enright will love this

—— Viv Groskop , Red Magazine

The gentle, meandering pace of this exquisitely expresses the agony of grief and the confusions and complexities of parental love

—— Easy Living

Moore's portrayal of loss is remarkably real

—— Clare Longrigg , Psychologies

Profoundly moving, beautifully written book

—— Waterstone's Books Quarterly

A marvellous book

—— Winnipeg Free Press

A perfectly pitched novel that captures its characters and their dilemmas.

—— Woman and Home

Lose yourself in a fantastical gastronomical journey ... This novel explores familial love in an unexpected way, and you'll be hooked from the first taste

—— She

This emotional and moving tale blew us away with its beauty

—— Bella

It's as beautiful as it is strange. Bender writes such lyrical sentences, you pause over them in wonder. She has an unusual take on life; and makes even the ordinary extraordinary. It's a compulsive page turner. This book is already a best seller in America, and has been embraced by book clubs. I loved it. It's one of those books you don't want to finish - and even when you have - it stays in your mind. Bender has written three previous novels. I intend to savour them all

—— Irish Examiner

This novel, in the style of stories like Chocolat, is a dreamy feast of gorgeous writing ... Gently, beautiful, odd, this is a story to sip and savour

—— Dublin Evening Herald

An intriguing premise for an original novel about a family and its relationships

—— Good Book Guide

Moving and highly original, this book will make you look at food in a whole new light

—— Star
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