The Innocents

A subtle, witty and acutely observed study of a narrow but very recognisable world.

The Observer

Wonderful...witty…an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.

Stylist

The Innocents has garnered her a next-Zadie-Smith style buzz.

Tatler

Delightful… Segal’s writing is wise, witty and observant.

Kate Saunders, The Times

Segal writes with delicacy, accumulating details that create the texture of Adam and Rachel’s world… Adam is well drawn and not unsympathetic, and Segal has skillfully created a cast of secondary characters, including Ziva, a survivor of the Holocaust.

Tina Jackson, Metro

The central story transcends time, reflecting the omnipresence of love and its conflicting web of duty, confusion, temptation and lust.

Camilla Ter Haar, The Lady

The Innocents is an exuberant, sensitive, witty novel, elegantly written, partly a study of universal dramas of love, marriage and fear, partly a very modern, sassy London story, partly a Jewish novel. I found it irresistible

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Written with wisdom and deliciously subtle wit, in the tradition of Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Francesca Segal has a remarkable ability to bring characters vividly to life who are at once warm, funny, complex, and utterly recognizable. This is a wonderfully readable novel: elegant, accomplished and romantic

Andre Aciman

A moving, funny, richly drawn story of a young man's attempts to find out who he wants to be when there are so many others who know best. Full of real pleasures and unexpected wisdom, this book sweeps you along

Esther Freud

Stylish, witty, wonderfully moreish

A.D. Miller

A beautiful, bittersweet novel

Gin Phillips

Humourous and touching

Emam Hagestadt, Independent

An impressive debut...the struggle to achieve true adulthood, the loss of innocence and the consequences of adapting to a culture that levies certain expectations on its members, are all cleverly worked into a poised text

Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times

Witty and touching... An assured and audacious debut

Michael Arditti, Daily Mail

Compelling... Segal writes with an understated elegance

Lucy Scholes, Observer

An elegant little novel and a real delight to read... an updated version of the 1920 Pulitzer-prize-winning The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - the parallels are close, but given how deeply anti-Semitic the New York social elite was in that period, transplanting the story to a Jewish community is not only clever, it also gives a wider, more general point of reference, in quite a subtle way

Sara Maitland, Book Oxygen

·A mature love story that meditates on community and ties that bind…a contemporary recasting of that adroit classic, The Age of Innocence…Just like Old New York, this is a community that has its own way of doing things, and The Innocents takes its cue from Wharton’s anthropological musings, doubling as a primer on the importance of the Friday night dinner, the symbolism of the Rosh Hashanah, and the evolution of the Christmakah party…Segal…is a writer of instinctive warmth who can divertingly lavish a full page on a breakfast spread, yet she never loses sight of this haunted truth’

Hephzibah Anderson, Standpoint

Impresive debut…a poised text

Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times

It takes chutzpah to appropriate such a well-loved classic but Segal parallels the two convention-bound worlds with aplomb… [a] classily composed comedy of manners

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

Elegant little novel and a real delight to read

BookOxygen.com

Wittily observant

Caroline Jowett, Daily Express

Hugely enjoyable first novel... The end result falls somewhere between Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad (about a matriarchal Jewish rabbi) and David Nicholl's One Day (with its theme of mismatched love) and is all the more pleasing for that

Viv Groskop, Observer