Maggie O’Farrell: ‘It’s a relief to sink into someone else’s world’

“I find Amy Bloom a really forensic writer … I think she’s an absolute genius … This is one of those books I eagerly press into other people’s hands. She’s a real mistress of the white space on a page, the silences in a story.”

“I think it really is [a modern classic]. [Roberts] is often pushing the boundaries of what a narrative is capable of. But this book in particular, I think, is probably her most exciting … It ranges all over geography and all over history and the characters all hear each other’s echoes through time.”

“Molly Keane is an astonishingly gifted writer of tragedy and also comedy and the fusion of the two … It’s such a strange and peculiar world, but she leads the reader into it by the hand. It’s a world of massive hypocrisy and also just emotional suppression, emotional illiteracy.”

“It was like being plunged into an icy bath – it was so shocking and so thrilling. The voice is instantly compelling and instantly intimate … It is an astonishing book about a woman being given the wrong kind of care … somebody who was just slowly suffocating by the wrong kind of love.”

“The key thing for me is that this chivalric poem has, at its centre, a woman. The woman sitting by the fire is basically the key to the whole poem … If it was written by a woman, and I think it was, it was the woman having a bit of a laugh at the expense of all the men who think they’re really powerful and in charge.”