“Unsworth is one of the best historical novelists on either side of the Atlantic…his vast knowledge of 18th-century social and material conditions creates a rich and strange rendering of daily life that’s utterly persuasive.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Told with bite and freshness…Unsworth gives his figures glittering definition, and then leaves them open and undefined.” —The Boston Globe
“[Unsworth’s] sentences recall the sharp detail, moral sensitivity and ready wit of Charles Dickens. But his sense of the lumbering, uneven gait of social progress is more sophisticated, more tempered, one might say, by history.” —The Washington Post
