Daughters and Sons

'Original, artful and elegant... To read her for the first time is a singular experience' - Hilary Mantel

'Shrewd, sly, mordantly funny and magnificently odd, few literary voices are as distinctive, or as entertaining, as Ivy Compton-Burnett's. To see a novel of hers back in print is always a cause for celebration' - Sarah Waters

'Compton-Burnett anatomised primal emotions in a genteel arena: there are shades of Jane Austen here, as well as Pinter and Muriel Spark, but she remains entirely original - funny, shocking, horribly true' - Justine Jordan

'She is as much part of our great twentieth-century fictional heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde' - Guardian

'Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life' - Telegraph