Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley speculates that something dreadful and traumatic happened to AW at school, which marked her for life—obsessed her and damaged her. The experience prevented her from writing for years. At last, however, it drove...

Reviewer Lara Feigel found that PB 's allusions to actual, historical people (Paul sharing sentiments, his place of work, the circumstances of his falling in love, with Graham Greene ; Elinor owing something to Elizabeth Bowen

Hugo Lindgren , writing in the New York Times, praised JG 's perceptive and fluid prose. This, he wrote, feels mentally healthful, exiling the noise and clutter of your mind; it reconciled him...

Hadley devoted much of her review to the structure of the trilogy as a whole: an ambitious and complex portrait of extraordinary times. Since each book retells the story from a vantage point in the...

Ruth Scurr in the Telegraph judged EJH to be as impressive a writer as ever in this novel, and instanced her handling of dialogue among children.Lettie Ransley in the Guardian wrote that this was...

Tessa Hadley (not an admirer of PHJ 's work) called this book unfailingly self-serving but at least intermittently gritty with the oddity of real life.

Wendy Pollard , who published a biography of her in 2014, was admiringly enthusiastic about PHJ 's writing; Tessa Hadley , who reviewed the biography, held a much lower opinion. Johnson's style, wrote Hadley, was...