The Voice in My Ear

The Voice in My Ear is so devastatingly perceptive and intimidatingly accomplished in a range of modes that it's hard to sit still while you're reading; often I found myself pacing up and down the hallway in raptures at the quality of the prose or terror at the exquisitely harrowing turn of the plot. Aside from the formal mastery, Leviston is fearless in facing difficult truths of which lesser writers never even get within telescopic range. Uncompromising and stricken but delivered through beautiful observation and unrivalled emotional and intellectual insight.

Luke Kennard

What an extraordinary book, so dense with understanding about personhood and relatedness, about connection, disconnection and unconnection. Frances Leviston puts her distinctive and compelling style at the service of a precise, sinuous, at times agonisingly subcutaneous storytelling. There's a clarity and superobservancy of the everyday that she conveys along with 'the sorrow that never was said': the hidden, the unspeakable, that shapes so much of experience.

David Hayden

This heated, haunted debut is about the dark, violent knots we carry inside ourselves – and what happens when they start to unravel. A lyric, frightening portrayal of what it means to move through the world in female form.

Sue Rainsford

The absorbing stories that make up Frances Leviston's The Voice in My Ear do what fiction does best, swimming deep in complexity and ambivalence. A work of high emotional intelligence and narrative control.

Rob Doyle

Frances Leviston’s prose, like her poetry, is as illuminating as it is unsettling. Her narratives are all about what remains unsaid and the silent inexorable falling into place of deep truth.

Lavinia Greenlaw

A beautiful, brilliant, painful book. It is subtly but unignorably haunting, and its power builds and builds – Leviston has such a clear grasp of the most difficult aspects of being human, and being a woman, from sexual dynamics to surviving your own family. Darkly comic and quietly, devastatingly urgent.

Daisy Buchanan

A remarkable work of fiction – the idea behind it is both brilliant and simple, but it is the execution that brings it off so unsettlingly well. Leviston writes with lacerating psychological accuracy, and has a poet's sense for the details that give us – and so much more than us – away. In The Voice in my Ear, the dark undercurrents of our most ordinary relationships are exposed through a series of perfect plots and haunting character studies.

Patrick McGuinness

Superb. Elegant, enthralling, often frightening, Leviston walks the dangerous edge of desire and discovery in women's lives.

Adam Foulds

Absolutely exquisite, combining just the right amount of sweet and sour. The characters in The Voice in my Ear haunted me long after I'd finished reading. Leviston has an uncanny ability to turn a small moment into a kind of meditation on humanity.

Jan Carson

Beautifully, psychologically exact. Leviston reveals, confronts, disarms and pares us from our unwitting, falser selves. Superbly written and fearlessly imagined fiction.

Sarah Hall

Brilliant, bracing... Dazzling... One of the many triumphs of this original, peculiarly truthful book is to leave us questioning what kindness is and what care is, no longer able to take the platitudes of daily life for granted also unwilling to leave them behind.

Lara Feigel, Guardian

Frances Leviston’s debut work of fiction positively knocked my socks off. Each of the 10 stories in The Voice in My Ear is about a different woman called Claire — an apt appellation for characters illuminating aspects of modern life… She has triumphantly succeeded in turning a poetic perceptivity to the [short story] form.

Mia Levitin, Financial Times

This debut of short stories from poet Frances Leviston conjures up a neat hook... The cool electricity of Leviston's style leaves you eagerly awaiting her next move.

Anthony Cummins, Metro

The Eric Gregory award-winning poet Frances Leviston makes an auspicious fictional debut with this collection of short stories… Leviston has a beautiful way with prose.

Alexander Larman, Observer

A sharp, insightful story collection… Leviston is a keen observer of the ways other people can burrow deep inside an individual's mind… The emotional impact of such relationships are, in Leviston's hands, devastatingly, thrillingly clear.

New Statesman

Award-winning poet Frances Leviston’s impressive debut work of fiction…works brilliantly…inordinately more than a standard short-story collection… Leviston’s imagery leaps off the page… I am not going to forget [these characters] any time soon.

Lucy Scholes

[The Voice in My Ear has] a psychological and emotional coherence unusual for a story collection… You can feel the subtext pulse between the lines and occasionally, thrillingly, it surges onto the page… Extraordinary… Leviston is so skilled at noticing and cataloguing the emotional abrasion of being a daughter, the toll of motherhood and love’s ability to wound… But these responses are matched, and exceeded, by the admiration, excitement and exhilaration provoked by what she achieves on the page.

Chris Power, Sunday Times

The poet Frances Leviston brings her razor-sharp observations to prose.

Monocle

I absolutely loved these stories. They are by turns hilarious, horrifying and haunting – and always psychologically acute. Although it's a story collection it is very much unified as an exploration of the way that the same themes and preoccupations pursue us through our lives. A tour de force – I’m thrilled to see what Leviston does next.

Naomi Alderman

I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It felt like a choose your own adventure version of somebody’s life... I cannot say enough how much I enjoyed it. It’s a writer putting herself through her paces – it’s showing us what she can do and I’m really excited to see what she does next.

Naomi Alderman, BBC Radio 4 Front Row

[A] brilliant debut, Leviston's stories - each of which feature a different girl or woman called Claire - use technology, needlework, sex and horror to uncover the fractures that run through family life.

Guardian *Six of the best recent collections*

It's hard to explain how good this fiction debut by Frances Leviston is... So thrilling... Outstandingly well written.

Claire Harman, Times Literary Supplement *Books of the Year*