Beautiful, tender, and riveting. I have taken this book into my heart.

[A] quiet, musing, moving book of imaginary letters from one artist to another.

A miraculous, door-opening book

Since the publication of her memoir, Self-Portrait, Celia Paul has become almost as famous for her writing as her art... [In Letters to Gwen John] the analogies between the two painters - solitary, spiritual, quietly magnificent - become even clearer.

Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific.

At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the author shared with Gwen John.

[An] intimate, immediate form of memoir [combined] with elements of biography and art criticism. The end result is a beguiling, singular work of art - a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space... Paul's prose...glints and gleams on the page.

Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book.

It is really Paul who's centre stage, and she is fascinating; I do not feel, at this point, that I could ever tire of her mind, and the unlikely, singular way it turns.

An excellent new book. . . . In a nod to the epistolary novel, she addresses her letters to 'Dear Gwen.' It's a risky conceit, but as the intimacy grows - if not with John, then certainly with us - their clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly contemporary. Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than power and vulnerability do.

An utterly revelatory piece of art writing.

It's a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and supplication, and it's filled with buoyant representations of both Paul's and John's work. A charge runs through it, the crackly static electricity of two connected souls touching hands across a century.

Paul's prose is spare and luminous, revealing her painter's eye in attention to colour, texture, and depth... The included paintings, both John's and Paul's, are breathtaking. Fellow artists will relish this lucid look at what is required to "live and paint truthfully."

Remarkable dialectics of loneliness and desire, of love and manipulation, that Paul handles with patient - even disarming - frankness... Alongside the imaginative biography of John, and alongside the dated journal entries, the book is also a foray into Paul's past. The effect is one of a dreamscape, a mesh of past and present, as the borders between the two female artists soften and start to give.

Celia Paul, in both her painting and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her own inner life, as well as a careful chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that is barely perceptible, hardly there at all, and yet is the place where truth emerges, hangs in the balance, is not quite distinguishable from a lie. Letters to Gwen John...is a profound act of truth-telling made possible by the thrilling risk of tarrying at that contested border. Paul's writing is a kind of ritual, as well as a pilgrimage, in which she leads us into those hidden places where understanding is beside the point, and invites us simply to dwell with her and whomever else she summons.

A loving and inquiring text, a lyrical correspondence between two women filtered through the inner life of one. It is also an intimate cataloguing of how loneliness and desire transmute to artistic awakening.

De Waal's elegant prose, rapt eye for aesthetics, subtle character sketches, and nuanced musings on Jewish identity yield a rich, Proustian recreation of a lost era

de Waal's history, gives Letters to Camondo an undeniable emotional intensity

de Waal is a writer of grace and restlessly enquiring intelligence, and Letters to Camondo succeeds admirably... Edmund de Waal's beautiful book opens a window onto an entire lost world

A rich and gorgeous meditation on art and grief... Beautifully written, elegantly odd and wonderfully immersive, this is a book like no other

De Waal's sentences like to take the historical weight of the objects he describes, in prose that often puts you in mind of Bruce Chatwin, that other aesthete magically in thrall to painfully buried European history. He builds a picture of Camondo accumulating belongings in an extravagant effort at belonging... [an] unforgettable book

De Waal's gentle and thoughtful probing is persuasive and his exploration of the family history after the count's death in 1935 - especially the deaths of family members under the Nazis - is both poignant and unforced

The form of a series of letters to Camondo... [is] an inspired idea, for it allows de Waal to achieve an intimacy of tone and directness of expression... a powerful address that is both a rupture with and a binding to all that precedes it

A fascinating portrait of the French collector Count Moise de Camondo

Outsider art requires outsider biography, and Blackburn, an expert in finding new forms to fit odd lives, has managed her task magnificently.

Beautifully delicate.

Richly satisfying.

A gorgeous, dreamy quest, for a man named John Craske.

The book has an understated charm and is a beautifully rendered portrait of an artist’s life and landscape.

This tender biography is gossipy and philosophical by turns.

Executed with undeniable skill and the sense of an intimate acquaintance with life on the open seas.

Unusually moving.