An eloquent, subtle, poetic exploration of what words are and what they do to us. Enchanting, devastating, genius -- Helen Dunmore * * The Times * * Has one of the funniest opening pages Spark has ever written and it's full of her incomparable humour * * Evening Standard * * Delightful, laced with wry and witty observations. A rich satire * * Daily Mail * * My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme -- IAN RANKIN This is a work, as usual, of glittering Sparkian ice, whose thinly frozen surface tempts you to jump up and down jovially above something deeper and darker . . . One wonders at the simplicity and the intricacy of the plot, blowaway as gossamer . . . One marvels too at the under-surface play of spiritual light and dark . . . One of her funniest novels . . . Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful -- Ali Smith Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive -- JOHN UPDIKE * * New Yorker * * The care with which she uses words is matched by a gloriously carefree attitude. It's all part of her sanity, her breezy authorial self-confidence; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso * * Daily Telegraph * * A wholly original presence in modern literature -- ANDREW MOTION A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas * * New York Times Book Review * * Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit * * New Yorker * * She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius -- A N WILSON * * Spectator * *