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“... The​ most interesting novels are always a bit strange. The stories bend and shift with the author’s own predilections; they reject the predictable progress of conventional plotlines in favour of something that feels more risky and open-ended. They often go off the rails, these books, veering into the wide open spaces of the contingent and unexpected, in defiance of the kind of fiction designed to match outcome with expectation ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s work is still largely unknown in this country. Her life flickered on the margins of British literary modernism, with friends among the Garsington and Bloomsbury set, but she was always the outsider, the traveller, always on the move. There’s nothing about Mansfield that’s institutional. She knew Woolf and Lawrence and the rest, published in the same avant-garde magazines, went to the same parties and talked about the same things, but the fact that her biography doesn’t sit comfortably alongside theirs, seems more insubstantial than theirs, is due as much as anything to her idiosyncratic form of writing, one with ‘no contact with the real world at all’, as Frank O’Connor disparagingly put it ...”

“... generation’ story seems pathological, given its penchant for regression. By contrast Kirsty Gunn, whose first slim and lyrical novel, Rain, was published three years ago and much praised, plunges with The Keepsake into a romance of repetition that is as familiar and fetishistic as a velvet-lined boudoir: ‘Mother, daughter. Father, lover ...”