“It is a mystery as to why Violette Leduc doesn’t receive more accolades”

“With so much to recommend Leduc’s work, it is a mystery as to why she doesn’t receive more accolades. Perhaps it is due to Leduc’s trademark forthright style; as de Beauvoir commented in her foreword to Leduc’s most well-known work, La Bâtarde, “she doesn’t please; in fact, she alarms people”. Violette Leduc deserves to be reclaimed and enjoyed by a new generation of readers; these are lesbian classics, patiently waiting to be re-discovered.”

Sarah Cope, DIVA magazine

“Violette’s prose, hirsute and grating as always, throws itself into faces more spiritedly than today’s provocateurs, and above all more authentically. The reticence and languor of Thérèse and Isabelle renews an erotic tradition that today has become banal.”

Libération

“Perhaps her most sulphurous novel. But who’s better at describing the first innocence of desire, the beauty of clandestine and shared love, the force of female tenderness?”

Matricule des Anges

“This unabridged version restores, breathless, the intimate crescendo of an erotic journey, the murmur of each emotion. A woman’s body discovers sensuality under the pen of a writer who’s given her flesh to her writing.”

Magazine Littéraire

“Thérèse and Isabelle is written with unflinching sincerity and Leduc’s progressive attitude and experimental style confirm it as one of the greatest examples of French-language erotic literature.”

Olivia Heal, TLS

“But if the uncensored Thérèse and Isabelle reads like a fever-dream, to many it represents a long-awaited panacea.”

Thea Lenarduzzi, Literary Review

“So here we have extraordinary writing about sex; and, more importantly, about love, and the way it makes us feel.”

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

“Thunderbolts of illicit love. A classy new translation of Leduc’s masterpiece on the tyranny of love.”

Independant

“Reading Leduc is like discovering a whole new nervous system.”

Deborah Levy

“Lesbian story ban is lifted.”

Observer