- Published: 3 September 2019
- ISBN: 9781784875206
- Imprint: Vintage Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 368
- RRP: $22.99
The Bell
Vintage Classics Murdoch Series














- Published: 3 September 2019
- ISBN: 9781784875206
- Imprint: Vintage Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 368
- RRP: $22.99
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