Tenderness

What a triumph of skill and imagination is this powerful, moving, brilliant novel! I've never read anything quite like Tenderness, and I doubt I ever will again. This is more than a book about a book; this is a book about living - about really living, at the most dangerous and beautiful edges of the human experience. I stand in awe of Alison MacLeod. She is a novelist operating at the peak of her powers ... Tenderness is an utterly captivating read, and I came away from it with this astonished thought: There's nothing this writer can't do -- ELIZABETH GILBERT Tenderness is a triumph and it will conquer your heart. Stunning, illuminating, but also, profoundly moving -- ELIF SHAFAK As sublimely crafted as a novel could ever be. I'm in awe of Alison MacLeod's powers. Tenderness is an intricate, mesmerising tapestry of love and regret, prudery and desire, loneliness and togetherness, loyalty and betrayal, and the enigmas and conundrums involved in the art of committing these experiences to the page -- ISABELLA TREE Praise for Alison MacLeod: 'Full of simmering tension, resentment and unexpressed passion... A bold, cleverly told story from a writer who knows exactly what she's doing -- Viv Groskop * Observer * MacLeod is dazzlingly good at evoking a whole life through a single snapshot and at bending and stretching her prose as she moves between an impressive range of narrative personae -- Lara Feigel * Guardian * MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life * Times Literary Supplement * Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile; it's a novel of staggering elegance and beauty * Independent * A writer of great descriptive power... Like her modernist forebears, Macleod knows that life and death, the terrible and the mundane always co-exist - her genius lies in illustrating these truths while simultaneously spinning a bona fide pageturner * Daily Mail * The author's grasp of emotions, and history of art as well as politics, lend depth and charge... [There is also] the sensuality of MacLeod's prose, whether dealing with art, desire or love; and her uncanny way of allowing us to experience the thought processes of her characters as if they are traversing our own brain synapses * Independent on Sunday * MacLeod's fictions are modern indeed. They are fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts * Guardian * Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds ... and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling -- Helen Dunmore