The Blue Book

AL Kennedy is almost unique among British novelists for her ability to write fiction that is at once challengingly experimental, luminously beautiful and utterly readable. It helps that she is fiercely observant and very funny... If you want a guide to the rough contradictions of the heart, AL Kennedy is your woman -- Jane Shilling * Evening Standard *
An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished... the writing is as taught and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all -- Joan Bakewell * New Statesman *
This is a masterful novel, imaginatively crafted, shaped by big, precisely articulated emotion * The Times *
Kennedy is a fine stylist and single passages are exquisite * Financial Times *
Offers the pleasures of a work in which form and content dovetail with extraordinary skill, and in which narrative tricks are utilised to enlarge on the theme of deception rather than for the sake of tricksiness itself -- Edmund Gordon * Sunday Times *
It displays all the verbal artistry and emotional force of its predecessor, burrowing deep into the minds of its intense central characters -- Amber Pearson * Daily Mail *
The more mysterious elements of the novel's structure...make the book a giddy pleasure -- Anthony Cummins * Literary Review *
An impressive novel -- Keith Miller * Daily Telegraph *
If you like Kennedy's work, with its cool wit, spare stylishness, sharp sense of place and world-worn tenderness, then you'll find all those attributes here -- Keith Miller * Independent on Sunday *
Always a bold writer, she observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness, sometimes verging on morbidity, is always leavened with wit and humour. She also writes beautifully * Guardian *