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