The literary version of a Coen brothers film crossed with Catcher in the Rye. It's full of dry wit, glaring irony, and exaggerated language, and packed with eclectic characters, emblematic of a world gone to hell

The second novel from P. Robert Smith has as many twists and turns as you’d expect from the man who brought us Up A Tree At Night With A Hedgehog... It's a fun read

A collage of inexplainable happenings and strange characters... Dream-like... Quirky

[A] gloriously inventive follow-up to Up A Tree in the Park At Night with a Hedgehog...peopled with charming, quirky characters all in search of their own happy endings

A wonderfully wistful and funny novel

The author is not merely a dazzling entertainer, he is a no-nonsense moralist as well, and is as dextrous with the darker elements of betrayal and pain as with the farcical mechanics of love and clashing temperament

I just love this classic romance about a married mother who succumbs to an unsuitable lover and becomes pregnant by him, which of course results in all sorts of pressures and heartache. The best love story ever told

Probably one of the greatest novelistic treatments of the torments of love

Extremely moving . . . you'll be gripped

Irresistible comfort read

So fluid, the pages turn themselves

Tissues are essential. You'll ricochet between delicately watering eyes at the romance of it all and howling sobs at the unbearable tenderness

It would be a hard heart indeed that remained unmoved . . . the tender feelings that Noble engenders in her readers are to be cherished

It's one of the best accounts of clever English schoolboyhood I've read

Irony and imagery are deployed with a finesse even Flaubert wouldn't wince at...consummately elegant

Sinister, shocking and extremely powerful

Wonderful

Her writing is always thrilling and this is much more than simply a page-turner

A successful novel, well made and written with a light touch

It is beautifully written, and elegantly edited, and manages to pack in vivid characterisations built on tragic family histories... With its strong structure and interesting themes, it could be a textbook example of how to write a modern novel

Satisfying death-blow to place-in-the-sun escapism

A compelling novel

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

Creepily affecting

Chilling and vivid

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

Intriguing

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller