"Ms Perriam is one of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since Kingsley Amis. She is gifted with devastating powers of observation and can call up characters who are both compact and complex. In Perriam's books, life is an arena on which a perpetual battle for sexual and domestic supremacy is staged. You might not pick the winner, but you'll surely enjoy the contest."
Herald Tribune

"Each book is a magnificently orchestrated orgy in which her potent blend of sex, religion and humour takes the reader on a spiritual odyssey from the solid rocks of safety to the wilder shores of fantasy."
Time Out

"Wendy Perriam is one of the most interesting unsung novelists of her generation. Intelligent and accessible, she is fighting for the same bit of turf as Joanna Trollope; but she is probably the more accomplished and varied writer of the two. She writes beautifully about relationships and hilariously about sex."
Sunday Telegraph

It is Wendy Perriam's gift to set out a chessboard of conventional characters with whom the reader can identify, and move them, perfectly plausibly, into the most extraordinary situations. You settle down for a nice, undemanding read, then you are hooked and finally you cannot put the book down.
Daily Telegraph

"Perriam is rare among contemporary writers in the breadth of her canvas and the boldness of her colours: a sort of literary blend of Benjamin Haydon and Stanley Spencer."
Books and Bookmen

"Perriam makes waves with her novels because each of them is an unusually honest projection of her personality and each of them is sustained by a fine command of her craft."
Glasgow Herald

"Like Muriel Spark and Edna O'Brien, Wendy Perriam sticks her neck out to confront the subjects of sex and religion. She must be admired for her energy and her nerve."
The Scotsman

"I said in 1981, and have maintained ever since, that she is England's most brilliant, yet most appalling, woman novelist. The richness, the vitality, often the sheer genius of her prose, is enthralling. But her philosophy and her characters can be . . . appalling? Outrageous? What is the word for books where every human mood, from joy to dark depression, and every bodily function, from eating to copulating, is described with a shatteringly sensual impact that leaves you breathless. It is far removed from porn, or the calculated titillation of most modern fiction. Wendy's raison d'être is to use her magnificent command of words (a rare talent in semi-literate Britain) to portray life as it really is.

The conflict between her wild spirit and the discipline instilled by years of religious tyranny is what makes her such a unique mix of contradictions - beautiful yet plain; outgoing yet introspective; lighthearted yet darkly moody. She can be the best company in the world. She can also be quirky, provocative and downright maddening. But boring - never. Exactly the same can be said of her books. Indeed, they will surely live on as true literature long after she and the rest of us have gone."
June Sampson, Surrey Comet