A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing (Paperback)

A Curious Friendship tells the story of Rex Whistler and Edith Olivier with haunting novelistic intensity - a remarkable first book. - Observer Best Books of 2015

I loved A Curious Friendship. Anna Thomasson, in her first book, has brilliantly captured this strange coterie. - Sir Roy Strong

Provides a window on to a fascinating world, and the story is narrated with elegant verve - Lara Feigel, Guardian

Thoroughly researched, with elegant prose and a glittering cast of characters, Thomasson's account merges Victorian sensibilities with the raucous Jazz Age, giving the reader the best of both worlds. - Lyndsy Spence, The Lady

Reverent and sympathetic, and often fascinating - Lesley McDowell, Independent

Anna Thomasson tells her story well, her suggestions are shrewd, her prose pleasant, both are backed by much research. - Mark Amory, Oldie

Anna Thomasson is a wonderful writer, with a pitch-perfect ear and a marvellous sense of style. She knows her characters intimately with the result that one completely trusts her judgment every inch of the way. - Selina Hastings

Moving, thoughtful, entertaining and magnificently researched, Thomasson's account of a bohemian art student and sharp-witted - sometimes comically snobbish - spinster is an outstandingly accomplished and original first biography from a writer for whom we can predict a very bright future. - Miranda Seymour

Anna Thomasson has uncovered a remarkable story and brings these two fascinating but forgotten figures and their brilliant world vividly to light. An impressive debut. - Julie Kavanagh

It is a vibrant, admirably researched debut, tinkling with famous artistic names. A non-fictional Brideshead Revisited, it's piquantly evocative of that lost aesthetic echelon of 1920s & 1930s society which dissolved amid the shadows of war; and the convention-defying friendship threaded through it is enthralling - Caroline Sanderson