From the Heart

Devastatingly precise and moving... It felt right, true. There is nothing sentimental about it. It is told with a cleanness that allowed me all the space in the world to feel

Rachel Joyce

Truly startling

Melissa Katsoulis, Times

Pared back and elegant, this novel from the author of The Woman in Black packs a huge emotional punch

Psychologies

From the Heart is a coming-of-age story that embeds different forms of recognition… It keeps you guessing to the end. Its heroine learns things, and so does the reader – the chief one being never to underrate Susan Hill

David Grylls, Sunday Times

From the Heart never descends into sentimentality. Olive is a satisfyingly complex protagonist drawn with unerring but minimal strokes... captivating

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Sparely told and very moving

Fanny Blake, Woman & Home

There is an understated elegance to this tale of heartbreak and thwarted potential. Olive Piper is an appealing heroine... But secrecy, claustrophobic convention and an unexpected betrayal undermine her hope and happiness

Eithne Farry, Mail on Sunday

Susan Hill's stylistic approach to writing is one of the stand-out features of this novel -- fast-paced and punchy, with an attention to detail that powerfully reflects Olive's inner turmoil ... her naivete, combined with her struggle to find contentment, is both poignant and hugely endearing

Erin Bateman, Irish News

A quietly shattering coming-of-age story set in the late Fifties and early Sixties ... Hill's storytelling is vivid, yet spare. From the Heart is a captivating portrait of a woman caught in the wrong era. This slender novel could be devoured in an afternoon, but it has an unsettling quality that will stay with the reader long after it is finished

Violet Hudson, Daily Telegraph

From the Heart is the perfect antidote to online hysteria ... Stoic, [Olive] deals with inner turmoil with a measured control which is reflected in Hill's pared back writing. The descriptions of her intense feelings, when they come, are therefore all the more powerful

Kirsty McLuckie, The Scotsman

With great skill and poignancy, [From the Heart] charts 'the shift from being a girl to being a woman' and the devastation that ensues from bad judgement, wrong decisions and illicit desires ... So well drawn is her heroine, and so keenly realised her predicaments and misfortunes, that we feel for her at every turn ... [A] captivating book, one rich with subtle and sudden drama

Malcolm Forbes, The Herald

This short, sad novel conveys a wealth of emotion and will hold you fast from the first page

Vanessa Berridge, Sunday Express

Hill explores with great economy an idea of the ubiquity of differentness... From the Heart shows Susan Hill working in a consciously spare, undecorated style: the novel moves quickly, its sentiments pithily expressed. Such sparseness is central to its impact

Matthew Dennison, Spectator

The novel is at times almost unbearably painful as Olive attempts to make sense of a world for which she has been poorly prepared... A short but stunning achievement

Vanessa Berridge, Daily Express

What Hill conveys beautifully is the agony of all that is left unsaid in relationships. It is, ultimately, a novel about love: about the dilemmas we face when we are not permitted to live in the way that we wish

Observer