Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece

Mercè Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order

Dark and beautiful and brilliant

Rodoreda has bedazzled me

Read it for its beauty, for the way it will surprise and subvert your desires, and as a testament to the human spirit in the face of brutality and willful inhumanity

Utterly extraordinary - I have had few reading experiences like it - it's as if one is unravelling a terrible yet irresistible secret, the secret of death

The greatest contemporary Catalan novelist and possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho

A heartbreaking, unforgettable read. One of the most important literary works from the second half of the 20th century

It is a total mystery to me why [Rodoreda] isn't widely worshipped. . . . She's on my list of authors whose works I intend to have read all of before I die. Tremendous, tremendous writer

One of the most radical works from the past century

The novel is suspenseful, pushing the reader through the images, memories, and voices that flow within the protagonist's often confused mind as he develops into manhood. Just as the unnamed protagonist must navigate a world of contradictions, the novel reflects Rodoreda's own political, social, and literary exile while speaking of a tyranny that feels almost uncanny in its incantation

Mercè Rodoreda is not just one of the most accomplished post-war Catalan authors; she is also widely considered, notably by Gabriel García Márquez, to be the greatest Spanish writer of the 20th century

We must be grateful to the Penguin European Writers series, a precious venture in these dark times

The Czech nation will surely feel that he has done [Lata Brandisova] justice.

Few historians could be better placed to investigate this subject than Keith Lowe . . . riveting

Magisterial. The biography of Maclean we have all been waiting for

Admirable… [a] compassionate, absorbing book

[A] persuasive and polished biography

Roland Philipps illuminates, in both broad and subtle strokes

Philipps does an admirable job of piecing together the spy’s tale

Philipps’s telling of the tale is masterly. He weaves a complex web of professional, psychological and marital themes into a wonderful fluent, coherent and compelling narrative

Elegant, thorough and surprisingly exciting

[A] superbly told tale

In A Spy Named Orphan Roland Philipps’s description of Donald Maclean’s psychological make-up chimes with what I have always felt about the Cambridge spies (Philby excepted) – namely, that their romance with the Soviet Union partook of patriotism as much as it did of espionage… Philipps makes the story and the slow uncovering of his treachery a gripping narrative and an overwhelmingly sad one