According to Queeney: A Novel - Couverture rigide

This is a small, wise book of small prose miracles ... It is a larger miracle in this way: it makes us feel we see Johnson and his friends in unexpected and unfamiliar ways which are nevertheless convincing and authentic (Andrew Marr)

Its subjects - guilt, passion, misunderstanding and suffering - are those that she has addressed throughout her career, but never so perfectly as in this book (Amanda Craig)

Deftly brilliant...Her novel may be called According to Queeney, but it is Bainbridge's unique and acute slant on life, and death, that everywhere transforms it into the slim, packed masterpiece it is (Sunday Times)

These real people are superbly recreated in fictional form...Bainbridge's spare prose is perfectly suited to her purpose, conveying an immediate sense of experience, in the muddle and intensity of the present. This is a highly intelligent, sophisticated and entertaining novel (Observer)

Bainbridge is brilliant at combining established fact and compelling fiction (Daily Mail)

This is a triumph, subtle, rich and heartrending...Anything worth reading is of course worth reading twice, and this is worth reading many times (Independent on Sunday)

Thought-provoking and bleakly beautiful...brilliant...Bainbridge has shown herself to be working at the peak of her form (Mail on Sunday)

Poignant, pierced with truth, According to Queeney reaches into the dustier realms of history, bringing vividly to life a group of remarkable personalities with all their frailties, absurdities and cruel sensitivities (Sunday Telegraph)

A dark, often hilarious and deeply human vision ... a major literary accomplishment (Margaret Atwood)

Majestically deft.... Absolutely wonderful (Kirkus, starred review)

Bainbridge's brilliantly imagined, universally acclaimed, Booker Prize–longlisted novel portrays the inordinate appetites and unrequited love touched off when the most celebrated man of eighteenth-century English letters, Samuel Johnson, enters the domain of a wealthy Southwark brewer and his wife, Hester Thrale. The melancholic, middle-aged lexicographer plunges into an increasingly ambiguous relationship with the vivacious Mrs. Thrale for the next twenty years. In that time Hester's eldest daughter, the neglected but prodigiously clever Queeney, will grow into young womanhood. Along the way, little of the emotional tangle and sexual tension stirring beneath the decorous surfaces of the Thrale household will escape Queeney's cold, observant eye. "A dark, often hilarious and deeply human vision ... a major literary accomplishment."—Margaret Atwood, Toronto Globe and Mail "....at the end of this luminous little novel ... we feel two losses ... the personal one and the loss to civilization."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "Dialogue and descriptions subtly and skillfully convey a sense not only of the period but also the personalities."—Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times "[Bainbridge's] most accomplished novel so far."—Washington Post Book World "Majestically deft.... Absolutely wonderful."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)