A Legacy

One of the very best novels I have ever read -- Nancy Mitford
Her masterwork. Elegant and haunting -- Hilary Mantel
One of the finest and most original prose stylists of her age . . . Darting, confident, brisk, and brittle . . . Each image has been freshly chiselled or rendered with a sparkling and glittering wit -- Colm Tóibín
Simply a masterpiece, idiosyncratic -- A.S. Byatt
At once historical novel and study of character, a collection of brilliantly objective portraits -- Aldous Huxley
A book of entirely delicious quality . . . Everything is new, cool, witty, elegant, and some scenes are uproariously funny -- Evelyn Waugh
If you have never read A Legacy, run out and get it tomorrow * Guardian *
A full-blown, extravagant historical novel, replete with the turreted houses and liveried footmen, the loves and betrayals and purloined letters - a murder, too - which customarily enliven that form . . . The bright rushes of talk, the fast, vivid stories of how things were. I don't know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it * New Yorker *
A Legacy is Sybille Bedford's magnum opus, and a little harmony has been restored to literature now that it's back again in bookstores * Wall Street Journal *
It has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set * London Review of Books *
One of the great books of the twentieth century -- Francis King
Its beautifully wrought depiction of human life as humorous and harrowing, interconnected and splintering, confused, unjust, and sometimes quite kind extends the legacy of the novel -- Brenda Wineapple * New York Review of Books *
A joy . . . Dialogue springs with life from the page, and the social and political milieu of a vanished age is brilliantly realised. Bedford is by turns hilarious and ironic in the best sense: compassionate and yet clear-eyed * Daily Telegraph *
A Legacy lives by its delightful tart and feline wit, and by its author's remarkable gift for capturing the breath of Europe past on the glass of fiction present * Time *
A Legacy takes the form of a kind of elaborate narrative scrapbook - consisting of fragmentary conversations, dimly recalled anecdotes, and oft-retold family legends interwoven with transcriptions of letters, telegrams, and newspaper accounts . . . The women in particular are arresting, memorable, as Bedford's female characters always are * Paris Review *