‘Harrower can pierce your heart.’

‘A scandalously overlooked writer.’

‘A coup…weirdly thrilling line by line…[its] dense and adult conversation crackles with a sense of moral urgency.’

‘Utterly hypnotic.’

‘She is brilliant on power, isolation and class.’

‘Harrower’s sparse prose is best read with careful concentration; it’s easy to miss a brilliant observation or an original turn of phrase…An Australian novelist of extraordinary talent.’

‘Her insights into the nature of love, the role of women and the torsions of power in even the most ordinary relationship are bitter and sometimes cruel, wielded in the way that acute honesty may be, like a whip. Yet they are always delivered via the honeyed dipper of her prose.’

‘A novel of astonishing psychological insight exploring the darker aspects of human attraction.’

‘An exploration of the psychologies of entitlement and deprivation in the context of love.’ Book of the Week

‘This is not a comfortable book. It is tight, intense, concentrated, powerful - almost hypnotic.’

‘Reading In Certain Circles gave me the thrill that only comes from the work of a major novelist.’

‘In Certain Circles is subtle yet wounding, and very much alive.’

‘A brilliant exploration of relationships, marriage, thwarted passion and the beauty and the price of love.’

‘There are many wonderful things in this novel. Harrower’s skill in evoking a place is impressive. Her eye for oddities of behaviour, for quirks of character and for patches of pretentiousness is as sure as ever. The wry intelligence of her view of middle-class Australian life is evident throughout. Her writing is characteristically sharp and pithy. Whatever the reason behind her decision not to allow this novel to be released four decades ago, its rebirth is an event to be celebrated.’

‘Exceptional’

‘With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower’s rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes the complex passions beneath a drawing-room-scenario surface.’

‘A stark, uncompromising drama of marital imprisonment and psychological manipulation. In its atmosphere of dread and compulsion it has elements of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic suspense novels. But Ms. Harrower’s fearsome objectivity and her bristling, beautiful prose come from modernist masters like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen.’

‘Harrower was right about In Certain Circles being well written, but surely wrong to take its superb style for granted, as if mere literary muscle memory. Like the rest of her work, the novel is severely achieved: the coolly exact prose cannot be distinguished from the ashen exhaustion of its tragic fires…The book belongs with her best work, with The Watch Tower and The Long Prospect…[It] is more explicit than Harrower’s earlier work about ideological tensions between men and women. It is also broader in scope and not as angry—wiser and less hopeless.’