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Critical Acclaim for Sally Emerson |
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'The most comprehensive of these anthologies perceptively looks two ways at once. As well as offering a wide-ranging selection of readings, Sally Emerson's In Loving Memory offers a whole section of hymns, prayers and readings - presumably in recognition of the fact that even in this secular age people's hearts move to ancient blood-rhythms, suspecting that "on the stroke of midnight God shall win".' Bel Mooney, The Times
'This is a most remarkable and elegant novel: steely too, swishing this way and that like a fine blade, catching present and past with a kind of icy dexterity. It has echoes of early Murdoch, at her most crystalline, or Durrell without the ornateness. It is also, of course, intensely romantic.' 'Read it quickly, savour it at your leisure.' 'This is a wonderful book. Sally Emerson's writing is elegant and controlled and her observation of detail - the superfluous sounds you listen to when someone else is speaking, for example - is marvellous ... The ending is wonderful, unexpected, and perfect. I wish I could tell you what it is.' 'Sally Emerson has an enormous gift for holding the reader in a case and forceful grip.'
'A taut, beautifully constructed story moving simply but inexorably towards its cataclysmic ending.' 'This is not a novel to start late at night, not only because it's scary. The trouble with Sally Emerson's bonfire of a book is that it demands to be read it one gulp, from its deadpan beginning ('I have gingery hair and no money, and bad habits like eating cold baked beans out of the tin') to its demonic end. Sleeplessness ensures. You could perhaps call it a true romance, except that the lovers are a pyromaniac and a nymphomaniac and their affair, touching though it is, leaves several corpses in its wake ... The sexual politics of Fire Child run from the extravagant to the outrageous ... This is a bravura performance.' Fire Child 'pulsates with lust, grief and revenge. In spite of the contemporary setting it has the immoderate quality of myth.' 'Sally Emerson's Fire Child is about good and evil, love and desire, creation and destruction, the universe ...' 'Sally Emerson has a talent for terror of the best kind; she understands obsession and hints chillingly at evil.' 'The narrative is compulsive and the characters irresistibly chilling' 'Miss Emerson has again produced a book which can be read as a comedy of modern manners, a love story or a murder mystery - a rare achievement.' 'Fire Child is a compulsive, commercial but clever and sophisticated novel, from a critically acclaimed writer.' 'Read, too, Sally Emerson's Fire Child, a several-layered story about a woman who from the age of 12 seduces and destroys men, 184 spare, subtle pages of lust, love, violence and - hooray - comedy.'
'A story of obsession and love and the difference between the two ... Emerson writes superbly about the dark side of love.' 'Emerson writes superbly about the dark side of love ... The build up of horror weaves strands, as spiders do, to bring the reader just where she wants. 'An intense, disciplined novel of ungovernable forces.' 'In this tense, sensuous novel, Emerson leads her characters away from everything safe and dependable.' 'Sally Emerson writes like a dangerous angel.' 'Quivering with subtle erotic tension and sparkling observation ...' 'Permeated with eroticism and danger ... a really gripping book that captures perfectly the seesawing state of mind of its heroine and, most unnervingly, the compulsive pull of a past containing unfinished business.' 'Sally Emerson has done something rather remarkable: in Heat she has restored passion to the serious English novel ... it takes courage and nerve to put passion at the centre of a novel, and to take its companion, obsession, as seriously as Emily Bronte did. Yet that is what Sally Emerson has dared to do: to remove Wuthering Heights from the Yorkshire moors, and place it in a long, hot Washington summer ... The drama and uncertainty are intensified by the cloying and oppressive atmosphere of Washington: an urban hothouse breeding corrupt desires and longings. Washington, which Sally Emerson knows well, and makes utterly convincing and immediate to a reader who has never been there, is as much a character in the novel as the seedy streets of London are in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair - one of the few English novels of the last half-century to make sexual obsession a central theme as successfully as Sally Emerson does here. This is a compelling novel, permeated with an eroticism that has no longer anything to do with what we recognize as love, an eroticism which can only eventually lead to death, and which one suspects will never be stifled in the survivor. But will that be Phillip or Susan? The question is dangled before the reader to the very end ...'
'A vital blend of detachment and passion ... Sally Emerson excels in razor-sharp observations.' 'Second Sight is a very clever novel about youth and its careful obsessions, and middle age and its careless sexuality ... It has more than a little of Irish Murdoch's style, wit and sense of the bizarre.' 'Calm authority and delicate wit' 'Strong and individual'
'Sally Emerson's assault on marriage is as lively as her panegyric on babyhood. For sensitivity hitched to wit she is a delight to read.' 'This is dark and scary and humorous and moving and at times plain nasty. New mothers will love it. 'A novel which demands to be read in one sitting' Sunday Telegraph 'Emerson is a writer who excels in portraying the darkness beneath polished surfaces ... Her social observation is as good as ever, and she continues to unearth the uncertainty and pain beneath the sophisticated veneer.' 'This is a poignant, absorbing and terribly heart-rending story' 'Sharply observed ... Emerson makes no judgements but rather accurately observes the whirlpool of conflicting feelings that can overwhelm the most hard head of women who are dominated by their gurgling Buddhas.'
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