The best group biography of the year – of many years, in fact – is Sarah Watling’s Noble Savages, the story of the four Olivier sisters... Their mother was the model for Tess of the D’Urbevilles, their joint best friend was Rupert Brooke, and they had, said Virginia Woolf, strange glass eyes which they took out at night. But this is not why they are interesting. After feral childhoods in Surrey, where their parents lived in a Fabian utopia, each woman struggled with postwar realities: insanity, grief, poverty, catastrophic marriages. Elegantly structured in “seven fragments”, Watling’s book gives us a riveting drama that begins as pastoral comedy and ends as tragedy.

This is the first time [the Olivier sisters] have had a biography to themselves, and a very fine job Sarah Watling makes of it… thoroughly fascinating... This book is interesting on a dozen levels.

Four remarkable sisters born at the end of the 19th century, and I didn’t know about any of them before reading this utterly absorbing book in which their whole lives are laid before us. Their story has opened my eyes to whole new areas of early 20th-century British life.

In this compelling biography Sarah Watling tells [the Olivier sisters’] tale for the first time. It is the story of the end of Victorianism and the birth of the modern age. It is also, grippingly, the story of the early feminist movement, and a vital contribution to the construction of an alternative women’s history… [Watling] is quite brilliant.

A story of four girls rebelling against Edwardian stuffiness is vividly told… in this thoughtful, compassionate biography… I found much to celebrate and admire here.

In her highly accomplished first book Sarah Watling aims to follow [the Oliviers'] lives as a way of recovering what still feel like missing aspects of twentieth-century female life ... Watling is excellent on the way that biographers’ zeal for “uncovering” material facts and psychological truths about their subjects is really an attempt to claim authority for what are essentially acts of imagination... This does not mean, though, that Watling is willing to sacrifice the rich, enduring pleasures of biographical storytelling ... Watling deftly uses the Oliviers’ lives to reanimate the kinds of female experience that tend to lie inert inside grander narratives.

If the Bloomsberries lived in squares and loved in triangles, the Olivier sisters lived in tents and loved in Venn diagrams… Sarah Watling’s riveting book… is a noble endeavour and a laudable achievement.

This marvellous biography… shines a light on these four fascinating women [the Olivier sisters] – and the dramatic, pioneering lives they led.

Watling vividly conjures up the sisters, but ultimately this is an exploration of the difficulty of knowing anyone truly, and how sisterhood makes it harder still… it renders them inspiring without flattening them into the bland ‘rebel girls’ stereotypes currently in vogue.

Sarah Watling’s expertly crafted portrait of the lives of the Olivier sisters manages to draw out of the archives not only vital threads of English cultural history but a sense of the risk of new biographical subjects being seen and heard for the first time. Watling is a highly sensitive curator and she handles her subjects with exquisite care, folding them back into the environments which made them and allowing us to visit them there. I read Noble Savages and I was reminded of the thrill of first reading the writings of ethnographer and explorer, Mary Kingsley.

Sarah Watling puts four remarkable twentieth-century lives in the spotlight with sympathy and lightly-worn scholarship. What trailblazers they were!

Watling’s book gives us a riveting drama that begins as pastoral comedy and ends as tragedy

A rollicking ride.

A fascinating tale of the three Soong sisters who played a significant role in the making of 20th-century China…[told] with lacerating honesty.

An enjoyable take on China’s turbulent 20th-century history, seen through the revealing perspective of three women at the centre of power

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a gripping story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a sweeping journey… a group biography that is by turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China.

A story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal.

[Chang’s] breathtaking new new triple biography restores these “tiger-willed” women to their extraordinarily complex humanity… As in her bestselling 1991 memoir Wild Swans, Chang uses a gripping and emotional personal story to draw Western readers into the history of China.

Thrilling.

A page-turning police procedural . . . . Far beyond a murder mystery, the novel is a textured examination of truth, assumption, and deception. Rich street scenes and dialogue embed in the reader’s mind undercurrents of the paranoia of living in a totalitarian state where neighbour betrays neighbour, colleague denounces colleague, and police gather information to manipulate underlings and bury the secrets of political leaders.

Matthews is especially adept at limning the bureaucratic infighting and political double-dealing that permeate Soviet society . . . the depiction of the forces and behaviours animating Soviet life are compelling . . . well-constructed characters, and the persistence of history is a powerful tidal presence . . . this thriller provides many pleasures.

Magical . . . don’t miss it.

A terrific thriller, knowledgeably written, intricately plotted and the more chilling for being based on a true story.