A ripping tale set in the year of 1210. Full of colour and detail

Maitland's richest yet: a breathless romp through an England rendered spiritually desolate. Bubbles over with the exploits of desperate priests, scheming herbalists, torturous conspirators, a dwarf-sized madam and a plot of treason against the King

Bawdy and brutal

A gem of a story. Meticulously researched and told with blood-curdling relish, this is a tale that will keep you awake at night

A richly evocative page-turner which brings to life a lost and terrible period of British history, with a disturbing final twist worthy of a master of the spine-tingler, such as Henry James

Karen Maitland neatly catches the spirit of primitive superstition

A truly impressive writer

Extraordinary, sometimes very funny, and extremely evocative… Powerfully evocative

Wonderfully unique

It’s rare to feel so completely inside someone’s head

Elanor Dymott's arresting debut...combines the pleasures of a thriller with an elegiac meditation on the trials of youth

A dark clever campus novel that draws the reader into a skilfully woven web of half-told stories... Crafted and elegantly written

Dymott’s capacity to conjure striking imagery is exceptional. This is more than a murder mystery. It’s an examination of the subjectivity of accounts of truth. It’s a desperately moving love story about a lonely man who finds salvation in another only to have his idyll destroyed. It's a tale of revenge, served cold and deadly

This is a love story, told in reverse, a haunting tale of youth and lost love, and a poetical thriller.A powerful debut and a distinctive voice

Elanor Dymott’s gorgeous debut novel is a murder mystery that’s also a brilliant meditation on love and memory and loss. Like the Robert Browning poems her characters read at Oxford, the book is spooky, lovesick, dark, and lush, its narrator circling obsessively back on the death at its heart

An irresistible blast of an opening which never disappoints in a journey into a complex knot of intense and ultimately destructive relationships from which the murder that is the dark core ofThis excellent debut novel distills

A beautiful, lucid nightmare of a book. A mystery of love and murder that is elegantly written, disturbing, always compelling, and lingers long in the mind

A literary thriller wrapped up in a whodunit love story, Elanor Dymott's debut makes for compulsive reading. The complexity of the plot put me in mind of The Secret History;
it deserves to reach just as wide an audience

Every Contact Leaves a Trace is beautifully paced, from the graphic event at its start through all its shifting possibilities to its strange, logical conclusion. It is a marvelous book

Erudite debut

This murder mystery...gripped me with unusual force... This novel sucks you in beautifully, and will not let you go

This is a class act which unveils its secrets as tantalisingly as a courtesan

Wonderfully evocative of Oxford, this is a love story and a mystery that will keep you guessing

Part love story, part murder mystery… Dymott’s novel is ample proof of the literary flair that lurks within some lawyers

One of the best books I’ve read this year