A novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength ... it brings the past, in all its difference, bewilderingly into our present. It fills me with a wild, savage envy and no novelist could say fairer than that. -- Angela Carter There is no greater triumph than fiction which engages with life's tragedy and comedy both, and which acknowledges their inseparability. Oscar and Lucinda accomplishes this. Full of ideas - about religion, about nationhood, about individuality - it is never burdened by them: it is always fixed in the material world, in its endlessly surprising detail. -- Claire Messud * Daily Telegraph *