The Bell

She's writing about the only things that matter – love, goodness and how to be happy

Patrick Gale, Independent

The plot is both comical and moving, and it’s a book that everyone who’s ever been tempted to throw in the towel and become a hermit should read....despite the grand subjects at issue, the novel’s tone is not at all dry or didactic – it is, on the contrary, wonderfully lively and poignant at the same time, tender with a sprightly social comedy reminiscent of PG Wodehouse and Barbara Pym

Guardian

Her characters are described with loving exactitude and in such depth that their struggles to define what it means to live a good life take on dramatic force

New York Times

How bloody good her novels are – how intelligent, how lucent, how divinely crazy. They’re fun – I’d forgotten that

Sarah Waters, Guardian

Above all, she was a consummate story-teller, prodigiously inventive and generous, in the realist tradition of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Independent

A tragi-comic masterpiece... A magnificent novel

Susan Hill, The Lady

Her best book… Classic Murdoch tropes… are married to a spry and well-developed plot

James Marriott, The Times

The Bell is not frightening, precisely, but it offers that uneasy sensation of being suspended, somehow, between what is familiar and what is strange… a kind of hot, dreamlike muddle… The Bell has, in the 60 years since its publication, lost none of its power to disrupt

Sarah Perry, Daily Telegraph