Dusty Answer - Virago Modern Classics (Paperback)

The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers - The Times

Lehmann's story is both universal and deliciously particular, like all the best coming-of-age stories. No one has written more brilliantly about having one's heart broken, about despair and longing, humiliation and hope: all the wretched thrilling chaos that accompanies growing up. Finding it at fifteen felt a little like stumbling upon magic. Miraculously, all these years and re-readings later, it still has that effect on me - Harriet Lane, Independent

Beautifully written and observed, and an interesting representation of the ideas of and pressures upon a generation of intellectual women immediately after the Great War - Telegraph

[Lehman] is immensely readable, acute, passionate, funny and original - Elizabeth Jane Howard

It is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation . . . The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art - Sunday Times

Lehmann has always written brilliantly of women in love, of mothers and daughters - Margaret Drabble

It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read - Jonathan Coe

This is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time - Spectator

Whoever loves the earth, and especially whoever loves English earth, will drink delicious draughts from this book; for not only beauty, but the ache of beauty, is alive in it - Atlantic

The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers - THE TIMES

It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read - Jonathan Coe