A heartfelt and very contemporary thriller with huge emotional heft

Heart-poundingly suspenseful and heart-wrenchingly insightful, NEED TO KNOW hums with authentic detail, crisp storytelling, and characters that will long stay in your thoughts.

This compulsive, clever thriller will have you reading long into the night.

If you liked THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR, try NEED TO KNOW by Karen Cleveland . . . Thrillers don't get much more twisty and turny than this one. If you don't mind staying up reading til 3am, this is the one for you.

Impressively compelling . . . this is probably the banker among the New Year crop thanks to its sheer page-turning readability.

The heart-stopping plot barely lets up pace throughout this brilliant novel.

You'll devour this terrific debut like the rest of us, skipping lunch, losing sleep, turning pages until the end, where we're all left waiting for more.

Karen Cleveland is the real deal - an exciting new voice in thrillers.

Prediction: if you read chapter one, you'll read chapter two. If you read chapter two, you'll miss dinner, stay up far too late, and feel tired at work tomorrow. This is that kind of book. Superb.

Remarkable

An immensely satisfying story with serpentine twists and turns . . . ingenious and compelling.

Breathless, complex, and seriously hardcore - don't plan to sleep tonight.

Taut, tough and visceral - and, most of all, written with a breath-taking authenticity'

A natural-born writer...strong, lucid, non-stop suspense

A wonderfully crafted story of action, history, and secrets that is as imaginative as it is compelling

A brilliant debut thriller. He knows how to hook a reader and keep them hoovering up pages

An enchanting mix of mystery and folklore.

This pungently atmospheric, quietly smoldering thriller sensitively mixes superstition, oral storytelling and the emerging psychology movement of the 19th century.

Once Upon A River succeeds in doing what you hope every book will do - pull you in from the first page, hold you captive in the middle, then leave you satisfied and thoughtful at the end. I loved it.

This enchanting historical story is full of folklore and intrigue.

Though Setterfield writes emotions with marvellous truth and subtlety, her most stunning prose is reserved for evocative descriptions of the natural world, creating an immersive experience made of light, texture, scent and sensation.

Like Setterfield’s earlier novel The Thirteenth Tale, Once Upon a River is very much a story about the spellbinding power of storytelling...a deeply satisfying read.

As the story progresses - by turns slow and melancholy, fast and furious, like its river setting - Diane Setterfield dips beguilingly into the intertwined lives of her vibrant characters.

This dense, absorbing, beautifully atmospheric novel weaves a truly hypnotic spell.

Setterfield is a master of the medium. Like the river at its core, her plot twists and turns with ease and confidence, and her writing is beautiful.

Setterfield brilliantly captures a time and place on the cusp of modernity, plays bleakness and warmth off against each other to create a life-affirming tale of what it means to be human.

An exquisitely crafted multi layered mystery.

Once Upon a River is one of the most pleasurable and satisfying new books I've read in a long time. Setterfield is a master storyteller, her language flowing with a dark magic very like the river at the heart of her tale: swift and entrancing, profound and beautiful. Give yourself a treat and read it!

Once Upon a River is a delight, just marvellous. I devoured it in gulps.

Once Upon A River succeeds in doing what you hope every book will do - pull you in from the first page, hold you captive in the middle, then leave you satisfied and thoughtful at the end. I loved it.