Freya

One to lose yourself in.

Bookseller

Enjoyed last year’s critically-acclaimed Curtain Call? Then you’ll love Anthony Quinn’s forthcoming novel Freya… Quinn is a gifted storyteller with a particular talent for creating distinctive, believable characters and setting individual lives against key historical moments.

Winq Magazine

Quinn explores the big issues of the century – feminism, homosexuality, immigration, the individual versus society – but does so with a deceptively light touch. He draws us into the consciousness of his protagonists in an utterly compelling way… Quinn’s characters…will continue to live on long after reaching the final line of this wonderful novel.

Andrew Wilson, Independent on Sunday

Here is a modern woman to be celebrated in all her contradictions and complexity. It’s fun to be in her company.

Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

There aren’t many novelists with smoother, more elegant prose styles than Anthony Quinn. His sentences practically purr on the page… Immensely enjoyable… Effortlessly entertaining and gracefully thought-provoking.

James Kidd, Independent

A highly readable novel… Freya herself is an impressive creation.

Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

A wonderful tale of female friendship… Elegant and compelling, it’s a riveting study of a changing world and the struggle of two women to find their place in it.

Eithne Farry, Mail on Sunday

A detailed character sketch… Very convincing and highly readable.

Phil Ramage, Nudge

The novel fluently pits a determinedly feminised consciousness against a rapidly changing England divided over immigration, gay rights and a burgeoning youth culture… [Freya is] brilliant, modern, wilful and a fascinatingly unreliable witness to her own flawed character… [Quinn’s] skill at depicting social and political turbulence through the prism of personal experience proves just as nimble [as his previous novels].

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

Quinn’s willingness fully to detail each of his scenes attests to his years as a film critic… It is a big but nuanced work.

Wynn Wheldon, Spectator

Hugely impressive new novel… The novel is satisfyingly complex and sets you thinking, but most of all you read it, at a gallop in my case, because of the sheer quality of Quinn’s prose – the apparent effortlessness with which he pulls off plotting, pacing and period features… Above all there is his ear for dialogue. The whole is a pure pleasure.

Peter Stanford, Tablet

Freya is one of those rare, sympathetic novels that improves the more time the reader gives it.

David Renton, Literary Review

It is the relationship between the reader and Freya that is most powerful. And, in the end, it is more real than the friendship between Freya and Nancy as you find yourself hoping that this sharp, contrary woman succeeds.

Alice Thomson, The Times

There’s plenty more to tantalise us as we move from the austere 1940s to the tumultuous 1960s... [Quinn] Has evidently gorged on recent histories of the period… Quinn’s skill lies in picking a surprising route through familiar terrain, blurring the boundaries of fact and fiction in a style that calls to mind William Boyd. Besides being adept at marshalling period detail, he is a fluent, engaging storyteller, whose suave prose masks an unusually shrewd sense of how relationships work.

Henry Hitchings, Financial Times

A remarkable portrait of post-war British society, the changing role of women and the barriers faced by female writers… Quinn has a lightness of touch and his deep empathy for his subject makes Freya an engrossing and memorable read.

Charlotte Heathcote, Daily Express

Brilliantly suspenseful novel… His skill lies in his ability to milk all the nostalgic appeal of his milieu… Quinn is too sharp-eyed, and even his most outlandish characters can bewitch and repel in equal measure. He is particularly good on the trancelike self-absorption of youth… Chapters crescendo towards cliffhanger endings, and the narrative hips on to its immensely satisfying end.

Oldie, Emily Bearn

I can’t remember the last time I devoured a book with such greed. Quinn’s eponymous, sweary heroine trailblazes her way through Oxford, Nuremberg, Soho and all points between.

Sara Manning, Red

A particularly well-drawn study of a strong-willed and abrasive young woman determined to make her way in a man’s world.

Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday