Reviews
Reviews: The Best Of everything
'A wonderful novel,
bursting with life'
Cathy Rentzenbrink
'A profoundly compassionate
novel of devastating power'
Bernardine Evaristo
'So deeply moving: sad
and beautiful and true'
Annie Macmanus
'A beautiful and important story about kindness that will break your heart, then make it sing'
Donal Ryan
'Kit de Waal takes an ordinary
life and renders it extraordinary'
Monica Ali
‘I defy you not to cry while reading this’
Red Magazine
‘Full of warmth, this is a joyous story of love and what family means to each of us’
Prima Magazine
‘A beautiful novel about kindness
and found family’
Good Housekeeping
‘There’s emotional magic in this latest novel from the ever-compassionate de Waal’
The Daily Mail
'Kit de Waal has an uncanny ability to create vivid characters with such empathy that I want to reach into the pages to hug them. I truly loved this book'
Liz Nugent
'A reminder that there are more interesting loves than the ones usually celebrated in novels'
Clare Chambers
‘The author of My Name is Leon knows how to tug at the heartstrings’.
The I Paper
'Beautiful. De Waal has the power to astound, to lift and console, to make life with her sentences'
'Paulette is a superbly drawn character, as are those that orbit her world'
'Kit de Waal's best work yet'
​
'A story that is at times gentle, surprising and full of forgiveness and redemption'
REVIEWS: Without Warning & Only Sometimes
[Kit's] evocative memoir of growing up in 1960s Moseley, perfectly captures the dreams and reality of migration to postwar Birmingham.​
In this intelligent, angry and sometimes very funny memoir, the novelist looks back on her childhood as a Jehovah’s witness.
Dynamic and immersive, Kit de Waal's effervescent memoir documents a fraught childhood of opposites and conflicting identities with wit, humanity and an uncanny power for bringing the figures of her youth to vibrant life.
REVIEWS: Becoming Dinah
A recasting of Moby Dick with a feminist twist, is Kit de Waal’s first YA novel, it will hopefully not be the last!
Becoming Dinah boasts standout
characters, lashings of sass and a warm and generous heart.
Exploring issues of identity and gender, whilst teasing out aspects of parental relationships, obsession, and being Other.
REVIEWS: The Trick to Time
The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal review – life on the fringes of sweeping change
Kit de Waal: The Trick to Time review - In search of lost time
Review: The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal — the children who never lived
REVIEWS My Name Is Leon
My Name Is Leon, moving story of racial injustice
An emotional pile-driver arrives on a wave of hype
A boy separated from his brother finds respite in an allotment community
WHAT KIT SAYS
"Don’t dip your pen in someone else’s blood."
— Kit de Waal, The Irish Times
