`The most powerful of her novels, a near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling ... She writes like an angel.' Sunday Telegraph `Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation, and in An Experiment in Love she has written a bleak tale seamed ... Read morewith crackling wit.' Helen Dunmore, Observer `Funny, tragic and wondefully perceptive, this is a book to be treasured, for the sheer quality of its writing and for its honesty.' Independent `Mantel writes prose of imperturbable aplomp, crisp with irony and highlighted with deftly places, elegantly surprising images ... she has a penchant for caustic, spiky heroines and a sardonic ear for dialogue.' Sunday Times `My favourite novel of the year: An Experiment in Love is written with subtle perceptiveness, sharp wit and canny wisdom' Margaret Forster, Independent `Cool unsentimental, and unassumingly authoritative.' Anita Brookner, Spectator `The time is 1970, and it is wonderfully well evoked ... The skill with which Mantel manages her time-shifts, the precision of her writing, the acuteness of her observations, the seriousness of her themes, and the way in which she weaves them into a coherant whole, make this an unusually satisfying novel.' Allan Massie, Scotsman `An Experiment in Love has much to say about its turbulant era, and is replete with the atmosphere of the cusp, with the prospect of irreversible change ... It is also a profoundly sad novel, to which Mantel's liberal sense of comedy and dazzling acuity for metaphor add an almost excruciating flavour.' Rachel Cusk, The Times Show Less