A seamless blend of historical fact and fiction...Foulds's writing has a poetic intensity and his descriptions of the autumnal woods around the asylum are as piercingly keen as his insight into the minds of the patients, the doctor and his family
Daily Mail
Adam Foulds won the 2008 Costa Poetry Award, and he is a skilful poet. These talents are well displayed in his prose which, while lyrical, never grows fussy or highfalutin'. He draws a walk-on character with a few deft strokes
- Lionel Shriver, Telegraph
A work of strikingly beautiful, unforced writing
Daily Express
The chief pleasure of the book is its prose: exquisite yet measured, precise, attentive to the world
Sunday Telegraph
Fould's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic - the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach
The Times