The Great Level

Historian Tillyard has a real feeling for the period and captures the pioneering spirit of the times, bristling with new challenges. But it is Jan's love for Eliza [...] that elicits the best and tenderest writing in the book. His understated emotions are extraordinarily poignant

Max Davidson, The Mail on Sunday

The Great Level proves worth the seven-year wait… This is an impressive piece of work, rich in historical detail and human insight

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

Historian Stella Tillyard's first fictional outing, Tides of War, earned her a 2012 Orange Prize nomination. Her second novel similarly showcases her skills as a chronicler of period and place... Fans of Rose Tremain will find much to admire in Tillyard's richly detailed and atmospheric romance

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

There is much to love in The Great Level - Tillyard writes with great authority...and the book has the smack of authenticity. The passages that Eliza narrates...are wonderful

Antonia Senior, The Times

Stella Tillyard's assured and entrancing second novel deserves a place of honour on this too-short Fenland shelf... A historian and biographer, Tillyard brings to her 17th-century plot and people a deep concern for accuracy, and a respect for the look and feel of the past, that never slides into fussy pedantry

Boyd Tonkin, The Arts Desk

A novel filled with atmospheric detail and memorable characters

Choice Magazine

Rousing and heroic... this is a novel of large vision and careful detail... [Tillyard] paddles her coracle deep into little-known channels and conjure atmospheres as thick as still summer air over the meres... Richly involving… The story of a strange and passionate relationship

Alexandra Harris, Guardian

Every phrase [is] weighed and shaped to reflect a slower, more relevant age… it is perfect for expressing this awed sense of uncharted nature as mysterious, beautifully locating us in the 17th century

Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Literary Review

Stella Tillyard has done that magical thing - combined solid historical research with an ethereal sense of the past. Her New Amsterdam in America is as wonderfully realised as the shifting world of the Fens in England. It’s a haunting book with characters who stay with the reader as their lives unfold like a sea mist

Philippa Gregory

Beautiful... the book has a painterly quality... [Tillyard] has a wonderful way with words and arresting images, and the writing is delightfully limpid throughout

Fenella Gentleman, Standpoint

This is the most beautiful historical novel you'll read all year; reminiscent of Marguerite Yourcenar at her very best in its lyrical grace and poetic intensity... Extraordinary

Simon Schama

If you want to be utterly transported to another time, another place – read Stella Tillyard's The Great Level. A haunting depiction of love and difference in the marshy seventeenth-century Fens

Amanda Vickery