‘I read Knowledge of Angels straight through one night: it was the best read of a novel I have had for years’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘If I were a Booker judge, I would select this [Knowledge of Angels] as most worthy of the prize’
DAILY MAIL
‘My favourite [book] this year. The book I would have most liked to win the Booker. It reworks ancient legend to tell a modern tale’
SUNDAY EXPRESS
‘Knowledge of Angels has the pace and velcro-grip of a whodunnit. It is no surface-skimming thriller, rather a profound and subtle book of contemporary allegorical significance’
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
‘A novel that tests the intellect yet also excites the imagination. Paton Walsh’s novel grips the mind and the heart. It ought also to grip the Booker Prize’
THE ECONOMIST
‘Although Knowledge of Angels is about questions of faith and intolerance, it is never boring. This is thanks, in part, to the compelling nature of its various stories. It is also thanks to Jill Paton Walsh’s beautiful spare language’
NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY
‘Jill Paton Walsh’s passionate fable, a novel about the extremes to which adherents of faith will go to attack those who differ and a search for meaning in an age in which faith has lost much of its edge. It is an important book because its subject touches all of us’
EVENING STANDARD
‘Paton Walsh draws sparkling dialogue from the bare bones of mediaeval theologians and her apparently simple tale is alive with multiple ironies’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘Clarity of line and tone, intelligent sensitivity to the human condition, graceful, beautifully balanced prose’
THE TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT
‘Jill Paton Walsh’s mediaeval historical novel did more than stick in my memory. For many days the book’s powerful mixture of vividly clear writing, strong characterisation and intense theological argument haunted my daylight hours and troubled my dreams’
THE TABLET
‘An incandescent novel . . . a mesmerising story populated by provocative characters in vivid atmospheric landscapes’
BOSTON GLOBE
‘Knowledge of Angels is several different kinds of novel that come together astonishingly well. It is a philosophical argument in a line that stretches from Swift to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It is as if she has set her text down on parchment and illuminated it. As a mediaeval courtly manuscript displayed trees, rabbits, hilltop villages, swooping angels, knightly processions and peasants reaping or making love, Knowledge of Angels – by means of writing alone – is a series of brilliant illuminations. They do not outshine the text so much as place it in a more spacious human context’
LOS ANGELES TIMES
‘[The author’s] lapidary prose leads the enchanted and unsuspecting reader from escapism to self-scrutiny’
NEW YORKER
‘An illuminated and illuminating book . . . [that] advances to a brilliant and relentless conclusion’
NEWSDAY
‘An immensely powerful and intelligent novel, beautifully written and filled with resonances for the dilemmas of our own time’
SUSAN COOPER
‘A disturbing and beautiful novel of ideas’
URSULA LE GUIN
‘What a marvellous and arresting fable! . . . I was reminded of The Name of the Rose and I suspect this novel will have an equivalent success’
ANNE STEVENSON
‘Rather like looking at a mediaeval illuminated manuscript recreated by a clever modern artist . . . luminous’
INDEPENDENT