2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
“I was very reminded of Barbara Pym when reading this novel. Like Pym, Spark focuses here on life in post-war London, but she manages to put a bit more colour on the palette than the grey tones of "Excellent Women", for example. Spark's compelling narrator Mrs. Hawkins takes us on a flash-back tour of her experiences in the eccentric world of London publishing in the 1950s and slowly embroils us in a mystery at once absurd and fascinating, with a quietly triumphant finale. The book was polled as one of the best British novels of the last 25 years by the Observer; I suspect Spark's death around the time of the poll might have had an undue influence on the voting. Be that as it may, it's a well-crafted, surely written, modest and entertaining novel.”