Extract: "I first tackled it in the summer, taking it on holiday. I was looking forward to getting into a really long book without pressure on my time. But I read about 150 pages and gave up in exasperation at its conceit and verbosity and got someone else to review it... The prose style is annoying, a pastiche of the omniscient narrator, a confident 'we', a device used successfully by some great 19th-century novelists but which now seems an intolerable affectation. Catton never shows, she tells, wagging on in the most officious way. She has a particularly dismaying habit of telling us what the characteristics of every personage are, before then making them conform to them, a sure-fire way of killing any curiosity."