It might have become shrill in the hands of a lesser writer. Christina Patterson The Sunday Times There is a fair amount of anger in the book: feminist anger, but also disdain for journalists, for the art industry, for a gendered world that ignores women like Harriet and rewards men like her husband. The Blazing World is a dazzling novel, the kind that makes you cry (or nearly cry) as well as think. Hustvedt writes with a cool precision that can give her work a blistering power. The fury is brilliantly done, and so is the love affair Harry embarks on with a fat failed poet. Victoria Moore Daily Mail Harry is a lovable, maddening whirlwind. This novel is a puzzle, a mystery, a dance, filled with intrigue, a truly wonderful intellectual work that makes you think and laugh and tickles the brain. Siri Hustvedt has created a complex world of play and interplay. Katie Roiphe Financial Times This novel is like a palimpsest, built from many paper-tissue thin layers, some more transparent than others, and told through many voices, put together so cleverly it is not clear where the lines are between fact and fiction, let alone between the fictions within the fiction. There is more heat in it, more wildness it seems to burst on to a whole other level of achievement and grace. Hustvedt's novels have always been smart, accomplished, critically acclaimed but this one feels like a departure. She throws herself into rich ambiguities. The book is clearly a feminist undertaking but joyously, unpredictably so. The Blazing World is the playful, ebullient, brainy story of Harriet 'Harry' Burden, an artist in her early sixties. I have told nearly everyone I love - and some random acquaintances - to stop whatever they are doing and read new novel.

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt