Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense, Land of the Living is a masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love
Guardian
A masterly novel of grief and conflict ... Audacious and moving ... What it means to be civilised and behave with decency are questions raised throughout this fine novel
... Read moreSunday Times
A quietly powerful novel
Observer
Remarkable and rare
Daily Mail
Elegant and precise, Georgina Harding wonderfully describes Charlie's sense of dislocation, his emotional unease and the impossibility of communicating complex feelings to those who haven't experienced war
Sunday Express
Tremendously imaginative, really compassionate ... Manages to make them almost tangibly real, really immersive
Frances Macmillan
BBC Radio 4 `Open Book'
A lyrical novel about war and memory
Guardian, Ones to Watch 2018
In sombre, elegant prose, Harding wonderfully describes Charlie's sense of dislocation, his emotional unease and the impossibility of communicating his complex feelings and fears to those closest to him
Eithne Farry
Mail on Sunday, The Best New Fiction
Revelatory in many ways, shining a light on the darker aspects of war ... Quiet power and unexpected grace ... Adds to Harding's reputation as an incisive chronicler of war and its aftermath
Financial Times
Written with an admirable precision, and the dark of the narrative has to be teased out ... It is a novel of ideas, for it invites you to think of questions of responsibility, exploitation, cruelty, brutality ... One of those rare novels which has you thinking, when you reach the end, that there is much you have passed over which demands a second reading to be fully felt and understood
Allan Massie
Scotsman
Over several restrained, poetic novels, Georgina Harding has carved out a space for herself as one of the most incisive explorers of physical adversity and its psychological effects ... Harding's graceful style and self-control illuminate the crushing weight of history on the individual, and how different strategies for survival can cause a lifetime of pain and regret ... Land of the Living is a poised and carefully crafted novel of powerful, submerged emotions, taking an under-explored aspect of Britain's war and finding in it something graceful and strange, mythic as well
Herald
Disquieting
Times Literary Supplement
Perfect - a flawless gem of a novel from start to finish ... Wonderful, strange and wise
Patrick McGrath Show Less