Not just a book of the year but now one of my desert island books.
- Adrian Turpin, Herald Scotland
Delicious and dead-on... All the embarrassments and gratifications of European travel are preserved in the amber of Maxwell's much pondered, seemingly casual prose.
New Yorker
As the voices of Austen, Turgenev and Tolstoy have survived, so will Maxwell's. There aren't many truly great writers among us. William Maxwell is one of them
The Times
It's hard not to see it as a work of genius
Times Literary Supplement
His gentle urbanity is a joy
Sunday Telegraph