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“... Jasmine is the novel which grew from a short story in Bharati Mukherjee’s collection The Middleman. Meatless Days is the autobiography (though an unusually oblique one) of Sara Suleri, the daughter of a Welsh mother and the Pakistani editor and journalist Z.A. Suleri. Both writers now teach at American universities. In The Middleman marginalised characters (the word ‘margin’ comes from Sanskrit) sent their despatches from the dangerous edge of things ...”

“... Candia McWilliam’s first novel, A Case of Knives, won the Betty Trask Award last year. I expect I am wrong in persistently remembering this as a prize for something called Romantic Fiction; I believe I am right in thinking that the rubric was extended to include the words ‘or traditional’. The formidable young McWilliam doesn’t seem to me to fit comfortably under either label ...”

“... around the dinner table. Crusty old patriarchs and rebellious daughters sit in amicable adjacency, Candia McWilliam pulls crackers with Harold Pinter, and the whole atmosphere (though no one would like to admit it) is rather jolly. Such anthologies have the paradoxical task of assembling a selection of supposedly distinctive voices and then subsuming them ...”

“... Candia McWilliam is six feet tall and used to being stared at. She always looked ‘a bit thick’, she says, ‘where thick overlaps with apparently sexy’: a mixed blessing for anyone. Indeed, the looks could be a liability: on her first honeymoon, she was briefly kidnapped in Oaxaca by a gang who’d mistaken her for Jimmy Connors’s new wife, Playboy’s 1977 Playmate of the Year ...”

“... a terrible shriek. It flew up into the air higher and higher then suddenly fell to the ground.’ Candia McWilliam’s first novel, A Case of Knives, has little room for slices of life: indeed, one of the things which makes it remarkable is the combination of a highly-wrought narrative surface with a self-consciously contrived structure. There’s an ...”

“... There is something unsettling, something quietly provocative of inner debate, about Candia McWilliam’s titles, of which, so far, there are only three. They are attached to slim works that occupy the borderlands between novella and novel, between meditation and narrative, between ScotsLit and literature for which a national tag is irrelevant ...”

“... pressure: from the severe containment of the novel and the lives within it, and from what Candia McWilliam, in her excellent introduction to the new paperback edition, calls ‘the violent entropic subtraction of death in youth, leaving a burnt place behind in the creation – a bright star gone’. Shortly after Fritz meets Sophie, her cough ...”

“... fluid social commerce of the Decameron. Classes mix through trade and sex. Vagrants drift to Candia (the old name for Heraklion); exiles have dealings with the sultan; the implausibly beautiful lady Alatiel finds no fewer than nine lovers, from merchants to princes, in locations ranging from Majorca to Smyrna. There are even brief glimpses of Northern ...”