Bleaker House

Critics Review

• Perfect

  Lena Dunham

• The perfect read for anyone who has ever considered themselves “a writer”

  Sunday Times Style Magazine

• Bleaker House swirls text, subtext, and context into a single narrative, a mesmerizing literary levitation act . . . lovely and thoughtful

  Vogue

• It’s not only her fellow writers who will be captivated by Stevens’s meditative, engagingly comic reflection on the three months she spent working on a novel

  Harper's Bazaar

• One of the most original, entertaining, and thought-provoking books I have ever read about the difficulty of writing a book

  New Yorker

• Hilarious and original, charming and engaging. I loved it

  Rebecca Wait, author of The View on the Way Down and The Followers

• Nell Stevens takes you on a wild ramble across the landscape of the writing life, and at the end sets you down somewhere entirely new and unexpected. This is a romp of a book, a genre-defying feat of the imagination, and pure pleasure to read.

  Alison Pick, Booker-longlisted author of Far to Go

• I read Bleaker House in a gulp. It’s a charming read whose first third has a laugh a page before Nell’s odyssey turns into something more serious. You can’t, just by attending writing school, learn how to produce fine writing. This clever and funny book shows you may also want to get out and experience the world, and yourself, as well.

  Dan Boothby, author of Island of Dreams

• Bleaker House is so riveting and so much fun to read, I would have loved it even if it hadn’t also been innovative and brilliant, but it is all those things. Nell Stevens is an excellent writer and I can’t wait to read every book she writes.

  Kate Christensen, author of PEN/Faulkner-winning The Great Man

• Entertaining . . . A thought-provoking reflection on writers and writing

  Tatler

• I wolfed this wholly original part-memoir, part travelogue, part short story collection in one sitting, and adored it. As well as being funny, edgy, confiding, and ever so slightly horrifying, it’s also a fascinating reflection on writing: how it is taught, and how it is learned. And you’ll never look at a potato – or a Ferrero Rocher chocolate – in quite the same way again

  Bookseller

• Fresh and spirited . . . A delightful literary debut

  Kirkus

• There’s something alluringly Victorian about the whole book . . . In our increasingly small and connected world, narratives that tackle the peculiar senses of loneliness and remove, and the effects they have on the self, are increasingly rare . . . Bleaker House never devolves into a stunt book. Instead, Stevens charts a path of personal and professional exploration tinged with both sadness and humor

  Jezebel

• An inventive memoir about a young writer’s struggle to find her literary footing

  NPR

• A whimsical, good-humored, yearning-filled, thought-provoking read

  Bustle

• Quirky and engaging . . . A captivating portrait of the creative life

  BookPage

• This year’s literary sensation . . . summer’s must-read . . . an often very entertaining book about failing to write a book . . . what makes it most like something Dunham might have conceived is the comic skill with which Stevens deftly builds up a portrait of herself as the flawed but loveably self-deluding heroine of her own pyrrhic publishing scheme. This is a picaresque, recognisably human tale of a young woman’s failure to follow through on the glaringly unrealistic goals she set herself.

  Evening Standard

• As Stevens wrestles with questions of how (and whether) to turn the grist of life’s happenings into literary material, she paints an honest portrait of writerly neurosis.

  San Francisco Chronicle

• An entertaining, perverse and singular book

  Observer

• Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty

  Guardian

• Confiding, edgy and ever-so-slightly horrifying . . . I enjoyed it so much I wolfed it in one sitting. Bleaker House is an enthralling reflection on writing: how it is taught and how you learn to do it. And you’ll never look at a potato or a Ferrero Rocher in quite the same way again.

  Daily Express

• Quirky . . . fascinating . . . she may not have written the novel of her dreams, but the book she has produced will resonate with anyone who has shared her ambitions [to write].

  Daily Mail