I can’t remember how I came to buy this book. Subsequently I have seen it numerous times on lists of modern classics and the best books of the last couple of decades. I realise now this is for good reason.
This book is quite unlike any other I have read and yet is superb. It’s a long one (4x standard book length I’d say) but it never felt as if it was going on. In fact, although I wasn’t willing it to go on any longer, I was also not willing it to finish any sooner. It was perfectly balanced and the writing was so smooth and a pleasure to read. Her style is, without the reader really noticing it, somehow effortless. Not a sentence out of place and every word counts. It would be a good one for aspiring fiction writers to study I suspect.
The world she manages to build over this epic is wonderful and all encompassing. Whenever I sat down to read this, I was entering the world – escapism as it should be done. I am aware that there was a tv adaptation of this but I don’t think I’ll watch it. Invariably these shatter the impressions already perfectly created by the words.
One from the very top drawer this one.