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“... Joyce came close to inventing a language that seemed to contain the mind’s endless restlessness.Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport, does not, despite the claims of some reviewers, consist of a single sentence (I counted 880). But it does contain one very long one: a comma-strewn stream that follows the thoughts of an Ohioan housewife during ...”

“... The best ever riff​ on bags was written by Lucy Ellmann in her novel Doctors and Nurses (2006). In swirling prose she attacks – as if just knocking it out – the essential points about these essential accessories. The quick character guide they offer: ‘Tiny shiny hand-held PODS for flighty ice maidens; galumphing CARPET-BAGS for the jilted and jaded ...”

“... The heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s new novel is one of an increasingly rare breed in modern fiction – a virgin. Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood ...”

“... what George Eliot called equivalent centres of self: as real to themselves as we are to ourselves. Lucy Ellmann has written a slim but stylish first novel. The matter of Sweet Desserts is easily summarised, though summary destroys the odd angling of the narrative. This is a daughter’s novel, but told ostensibly from a sister’s point of view. At the ...”

“... to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low enough to ...”

“... would settle for much less. Beryl Bainbridge would not mind working in ‘Marks and Sparks’’ Lucy Ellmann is prepared to consider ‘waitressing and prostitution’’ Penelope Lively is hoping to be offered a job as writer-in-residence on an oil-rig and Hilary Mantel thinks she could handle a stint of ‘collecting supermarket trolleys from ...”

“... Joyce had fun with sentencelessness and so more recently did Mike McCormack in Solar Bones and Lucy Ellmann in Ducks, Newburyport. But Fosse’s way with it is more inward and incantatory. The bigger transitions in Septology – switches in time from the sexagenarian Asle to his childhood self or from one Asle to the other – are usually prefaced ...”