The Vagabond

A mistress of metaphor and sparking detail, and with more punch than Proust ... Throughout this extraordinary – irreplaceable! – novel, Colette provides many exquisitely timed funny-sad turns ... And no one writes about relationships as perceptively as Colette

Guardian

An enchanting, sincere and beautifully constructed novel

The New York Times

The most subtle of feminist novels ... It tells the story of a soul’s quest for liberation and it asks all of the questions about marriage, love, jealousy, bisexuality, maleness and femaleness which our generation sometimes flatters itself it invented

Erica Jong

She explored her field without exhausting it or repeating herself, varying her approach as she grew older and more experienced…Intense and sensuous, her fiction is full of life and laughter, as she proceeded to tell the story of a woman’s life, from childhood into age

John Self, BBC Culture