Mrs Bridge

How it is done I only wish I knew

Dorothy Parker, Esquire

It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly

Daily Telegraph

This is the first time that I have finished reading something and then immediately returned to the beginning to read it again. It's incredible. It's one of the best books I've ever read

Ross Raisin, author of 'God's Own Country' and 'Waterline'

Intimate ... affecting ... very funny ... Mrs Bridge is a reflection of you and me, an exemplar of our shared humanity

Joshua Ferris, author of 'Then We Came to the End' and 'The Unnamed'

Written from a kind of tilted, ironic angle, it's often very funny... and if this were all Mrs Bridge was, it would still be one of the sharper novels about mid-20th-century domestic life. But Mrs Bridge is so much more than that...It's a book that is smart and knowing and makes its reader feel as if they're in on a joke, while at the same time gradually coaxing them to feel more and more empathy for its vaguely absurd main character, and ultimately playing them like an emotional Stradivarius

Guardian

Connell never mocks or condescends, but wrings every drop of comedy and pathos from his hidebound heroine's predicament

Sunday Telegraph

Evan S. Connell's portrayal of the decline and fall of a 1950s Kansas City housewife charts perfectly the tragedy of the unexamined life

Observer

An exquisite mixture of sympathy and ironic detachment ... Connell's writing has a terse, hard-bitten flavour, but the chapters tend to resolve themselves into resonant, Austen-like aphorisms: "While marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not"

Independent

If you have already read it, that's wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven't read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that's wonderful too, because you are still lucky enough to be able to read it for the first time ... A perfect novel ... What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true .... Mrs Bridge is one of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up

Meg Wolitzter, The New York Times