A devastating coming-of-age story from one of our most popular storytellers
Susan Hill has been a professional writer for over fifty years. Her books have won awards and prizes including the Whitbread, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Somerset Maugham, and have been shortlisted for the Booker. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Honours. Her novels include Strange Meeting, I?m the King of the Castle, In the Springtime of the Year and A Kind Man. She has also published autobiographical works and collections of short stories as well as the Simon Serrailler series of crime novels. The play of her ghost story The Woman in Black has been running in London?s West End since 1988. She has two adult daughters and lives in North Norfolk. www.susanhill.org.uk
A quietly shattering coming-of-age story set in the late Fifties
and early Sixties ... Hill's storytelling is vivid, yet spare. From
the Heart is a captivating portrait of a woman caught in the wrong
era. This slender novel could be devoured in an afternoon, but it
has an unsettling quality that will stay with the reader long after
it is finished
*Daily Telegraph*
The novel is at times almost unbearably painful as Olive attempts
to make sense of a world for which she has been poorly prepared...
A short but stunning achievement
*Daily Express*
From the Heart is a coming-of-age story that embeds different forms
of recognition… It keeps you guessing to the end. Its heroine
learns things, and so does the reader – the chief one being never
to underrate Susan Hill
*Sunday Times*
What Hill conveys beautifully is the agony of all that is left
unsaid in relationships. It is, ultimately, a novel about love:
about the dilemmas we face when we are not permitted to live in the
way that we wish
*Observer*
Susan Hill's stylistic approach to writing is one of the stand-out
features of this novel -- fast-paced and punchy, with an attention
to detail that powerfully reflects Olive's inner turmoil ... her
naivete, combined with her struggle to find contentment, is both
poignant and hugely endearing
*Irish News*
From the Heart never descends into sentimentality. Olive is a
satisfyingly complex protagonist drawn with unerring but minimal
strokes... captivating
*Daily Mail*
Truly startling
*Times*
There is an understated elegance to this tale of heartbreak and
thwarted potential. Olive Piper is an appealing heroine... But
secrecy, claustrophobic convention and an unexpected betrayal
undermine her hope and happiness
*Mail on Sunday*
Hill explores with great economy an idea of the ubiquity of
differentness... From the Heart shows Susan Hill working in a
consciously spare, undecorated style: the novel moves quickly, its
sentiments pithily expressed. Such sparseness is central to its
impact
*Spectator*
From the Heart is the perfect antidote to online hysteria ...
Stoic, [Olive] deals with inner turmoil with a measured control
which is reflected in Hill's pared back writing. The descriptions
of her intense feelings, when they come, are therefore all the more
powerful
*The Scotsman*
Sparely told and very moving
*Woman & Home*
With great skill and poignancy, [From the Heart] charts 'the shift
from being a girl to being a woman' and the devastation that ensues
from bad judgement, wrong decisions and illicit desires ... So well
drawn is her heroine, and so keenly realised her predicaments and
misfortunes, that we feel for her at every turn ... [A] captivating
book, one rich with subtle and sudden drama
*The Herald*
Pared back and elegant, this novel from the author of The Woman in
Black packs a huge emotional punch
*Psychologies*
This short, sad novel conveys a wealth of emotion and will hold you
fast from the first page
*Sunday Express*
Devastatingly precise and moving... It felt right, true. There is
nothing sentimental about it. It is told with a cleanness that
allowed me all the space in the world to feel
*Rachel Joyce*
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