Reviews of 'Adventures in Modern Marriage'

Highlights of the reviews so far:

From Melissa Katsoulis in The Times: 'William Nicholson is a gentleman of a certain age who lives in the country and writes novels about marriage... and has produced half-a-dozen well-regarded novels about contemporary life... Nicholson's insight into the female mind is uncanny and shows that he is a man who really listens when women talk... hard truths unearthed in this honest summation of heterosexual mores.'

From Alan Massie in The Scotsman: 'William Nicholson is a master of the ordinary... Anthony Trollope, the master of the novel of the everyday, gave perhaps his greatest novel the title 'The Way We Live Now'. That is Nicholson's subject too, and he has so thoroughly and credibly imagined his characters, their families, homes, careers, hopes, fears and lingering ambitions that he gives us an illuminating and penetrating picture of one part of modern English life in one section of society... Nicholson is a masterly writer, and this is a thoroughly engaging novel.'

From Anne Cunningham in the Irish Sunday Independent: 'It is in his depictions of these quiet desperations that Nicholson, with a precise and Proustian eye for the infinitesimal, excels... He has plenty to say about the intimate lives of 21st century fifty-somethings, about their small triumphs and disasters, and his text is seasoned with wry humour and tiny, almost imperceptible ironies. In this eminently readable novel about flawed souls in a flawed world, he reminds us - twice - of C.S.Lewis's line in 'Shadowlands' about why we read: "We read to know we're not alone."'

From Max Davidson in the Mail on Sunday: 'Nicholson knows this territory like the back of his hand, and as his comically oversexed characters navigate their various midlife crises, a fine, tenderly written tale takes shape.'

From Kate Kellaway in The Observer: 'This is a novel about the middle-aged, middle class married - and if you are all of the above you're likely to enjoy the queasy pleasure of spying on lives not a million miles from your own... The over-arching question is this: how does late-flowering desire accommodate itself? Nicholson writes well about female sexuality, seen here to be every bit as powerful as its male equivalent, and about death, too. But in the end this is about the middle-aged wish to give yourself the slip and start again.'