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“... It seems that they might be ready at last to come of age. An accomplished novelist of manners, Claire Messud writes in the tradition of Jane Austen, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, even nods to Austen through one of its plots, which involves a vicar and a spinster; its other plot, however, recounts the ...”

“... or diminution is reflected in the deceptive miniaturism of the twin stories in The Hunters. Messud labours on her two inches of ivory – and the book can, at times, feel like a labour – to create a work that tests the possibilities of how much can be encoded in how little. According to her British publishers, The Hunters was not considered for this ...”

“... someone to avoid, like Bridget Jones’s single woman found half-eaten by her Alsatian. Since Claire Messud can no longer use spinster in its neutral sense of an unmarried woman, she adopts a euphemism in this novel about a very disappointed schoolmarm without a husband or child who becomes obsessed with somebody else’s family. The refrain Nora ...”

“... Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, published five years ago, won praise from critics who know what they’re talking about – for example, Penelope Fitzgerald, writing in the LRB. It was a book that showed an easy technical control, an ability to do the things novelists have to do, and in so young a writer these skills were reasonably thought to presage later and more ambitious performances ...”

“... younger sister, who can’t bear the weight of what she hears. And yet her sacrifice helps nobody. Claire Messud’s sympathetic first novel, When the World Was Steady, looks at some of the same cross-tensions. Mrs Simpson, inappropriately named Melody, is growing old, and possesses what D.H. Lawrence, an expert in such matters, called a ‘toad-like ...”

“... of the memorial controversy. The encounter with Alyssa Spier was just a few days past, and for all Claire’s resistance, Spier’s insinuations had slithered inside to coil around Claire’s own doubts. This repulsive, reptilian distrust – it never left her now.’ The snakes of distrust, among other metaphors, have ...”