'Unlike anything I've read. With its broad scope and its intimacy and exactness, it cuts through the apparatus of life to the vivid moment. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It's wonderful.' Tessa Hadley 'Peculiar Ground is so clever and beautifully written, it gripped me from start to end. I abandoned work and family to finish it.' Roddy Doyle 'Lucy Hughes-Hallett's novel is immensely vivid, full of rich and deeply imagined life, and glowing with energy. Her Wychwood estate is utterly real, her characters (both seventeenth- and twentieth-century) entirely convincing, and the story moves with a masterful assurance.

There's a calm virtuosity in the language that I admired a great deal. I just enjoyed it so very much.' Philip Pullman Praise for The Pike: 'Hard to beat . a biographical tour de force . a rich, voluptuous treat . a triumph, the biography of the year' Robert McCrum, Observer, 'Books of the Year' '[The Pike] dramatically extends biography's formal range to encompass a daunting theme' TLS, 'Books of the Year' 'This is a magnificent portrait of a preposterous character . deplorable, brilliant, ludicrous, tragic but above all irresistible, as hundreds of women could testify. His biographer has done him full justice' Francis Wheen, Daily Mail 'A cracker of a biography, an extraordinary story .

In less skilled hands this could have been a disaster; in fact it works wonderfully well' Spectator, 'Books of the Year' 'Beautiful, strange and original . an extraordinarily intimate portrait' New Statesman 'Hugely enjoyable . Hughes-Hallett has a great talent for encapsulating an era or an attitude .That almost 700 pages flew by bears testimony to how pleasurable and readable those pages were' Sunday Times 'Hughes-Hallett dances her way through this extraordinary life in a style that is playful, punchy and generally pleasing .The amazing story of D'Annunzio is painted in primary colours, but with the darkest shadows' Observer.