The explicit behaviour and language definitely set it apart from its Victorian forebears, so it is amusing to think of the book as a reading club favourite. The result is a story that is immersed in the mid-1870s while allowing an unblinking gaze at its setting’s underside which novelists at the time were unable to provide. This is not pastiche, aping the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, because it is too knowing. Indeed, at times it seems that the real central characters are the readers, good voyeurs that we are.Michel Faber’s neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White vies with many of its nineteenth-century literary progenitors in terms of length, but it is shot through with a modern sensibility that acts as a distancing effect. couldn't (or wouldn't) write about.' - The Sunday Herald 'Takes the historical novel and, in the spirit of its subject matter, submits it to a good rogering in terms of graphically exposing the sexual details Dickens and Co.
'An intensely imaginative time-travel experience.' - The Independent Which is to say that the book is both mind-bogglingly clever and page-turningly tempting. 'Owes as much to John Fowles as it does to Charlotte Bronte.
a sybaritic pleasure and a ripping yarn.' - The Times 'Key to its success is the book's sly acknowledgment of its modernity without recourse to taking up the crude cudgels of irony. It's a feast for all five senses and in spite of its weight, it's impossible to put down.' - Val McDermid 'An astonishing narrative sweep that encompasses Victorian society in all its colourful variety, it peels away the surface gentility and brings its world to vivid life. 'When a book is this big, it had better be good - this one is. wildly entertaining' - The New York Times Faber's take on the 19th Century English novel is a heady and intoxicating mixture of affection, respect and scabrous resistance' - The Times 'This is an unputdownable book there is no choice but to give in to this most unbelievably pleasurable of narrative rides.
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