Lark and Termite

An intense tale of love, loss and the bond of family that survive, almost miraculously, over time and space... What could have been a fairly conventional story... is transformed by Phillips into something extraordinary

Neel Mukherjee, The Times

Lark and Termite, Phillips' fourth novel, has high expectations to live up to. That it meets, and even surpasses, such expectations is only one of its many achievements

Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

Remarkable. It is a strange and joyous book which will yield much to the patient reader

Elis Ni Dhuibhne, Irish Times

A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love.

Sarah Churchwell, Observer

Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

'What a beautiful, beautiful novel this is - so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving. I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark and Termite is by far the best new novel I've read in the last five years or so

Tim O'Brien

'This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light

Alice Munro

Phillip's writing is distinctive, audacious and powerful

Daily Telegraph

Consistently inventive, evocative and uncompromising. Haunting is a word much overused, but Lark and Termite is exactly that: a novel whose elegant lingering images are hard to shake from the memory. This is a glowing, powerful and immensely readable paean to the power of family

Independent

'A richly textured novel with a wondrous story at its heart about the many permutations of love'

Sunday Herald

'An extraordinary and brilliant piece of writing...a powerful and tender portrayal of a family'

Sunday Times

'A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love'

Observer

compulsive, innovative, challenging

Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday

Lark and Termite is extraordinary and it is luminous. This is not simply classic Jayne Anne Phillips. This is something far more extraordinary. It is an astounding feat of the imagination. It is the best novel I've read this year

Junot Díaz

The voices and structures are remarkable

Meaghan Delahunt, The Scotsman

Tender story

Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

With its almost mystical exploration of love in all its forms, this is a tender portrayal of a family that proves unsinkable

Elizabeth Buchan, The Sunday Times

Phillips's characters...are alive and intimately rendered; their warmth suffuses the novel like low-burning embers

Eimear Nolan, Irish Times