The Bell (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

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

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

Sarah Waters, 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

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