'Filled with echoes and resonance, intelligence and insight, Bailey's story unfolds the complex, touching failure of brotherly love with a refreshing lack of sentimentality or pretension...A compelling, blackly comic drama of family implosion'

'It is a pleasure to read a writer who makes writing so effortless...There are not many writers who can take as their central theme the Meaning of Life and come up smelling of roses'

'A beautifully written tale of how people create a city and how cities create people. Bailey has crafted a homage to a city that has clearly got under her skin, to produce one that gets under ours too'

A truly original new voice in fiction. Her bleakly poetic first novel has an atmosphere all of its own: melancholy and profound yet shot through with the urgency of life and love

was hard to put down. Love, idealism, corruption and insanity in the Danish court of the Enlightenment: the world he draws is so complete, it s a very absorbing read.

One of the most unusual and powerful fictional works of modern times.