The Chateau

Reviews / Votes

Not just a book of the year but now one of my desert island books. -- Adrian Turpin * Herald Scotland * Delicious and dead-on... All the embarrassments and gratifications of European travel are preserved in the amber of Maxwell's much pondered, seemingly casual prose. * New Yorker * As the voices of Austen, Turgenev and Tolstoy have survived, so will Maxwell's. There aren't many truly great writers among us. William Maxwell is one of them * The Times * It's hard not to see it as a work of genius * Times Literary Supplement * He combines educated intelligent and instinctive apprehension of human complexity in a way that would have earned Henry James' approval. William Maxwell is the very model of what a novelist should be * Independent on Sunday * Perennially endearing * Spectator * Reading The Chateau is like meeting a very old friend with whom the conversation is always spontaneous, intimate, restorative and unpredictable Surprising on every page... I ended The Chateau feeling very sad that it was over -- Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life His gentle urbanity is a joy * Sunday Telegraph * Reading 'The Chateau' is like meeting a very old friend with whom the conversation is always spontaneous, intimate, restorative and unpredictable... Maxwell is that rare thing, a kind writer... But what has made him so influential is his habit of interspersing his subtle accounts of character with sharp observations about human nature. * Independent *