A startlingly great debut. Holly’s beautiful prose smoulders, crackles and roars, but it’s the storytelling that really astonishes. Propulsive, immersive, a book you can really live in. This book is masterfully crafted, brilliantly socially observed, but most of all it’s a dazzlingly and painfully resonant exploration of the way women live, and how our freedom must be cherished and protected.

What Time is Love? is not only a beautifully told love story but also a fascinating account of the changing social mores of the 20th century. I found it delightful, insightful and immersive.

A unique and wonderfully crafted debut, What Time Is Love? has it all – nostalgia and romance, captivating characters and stunning prose. It’s a truly tender, thought-provoking exploration of what makes a relationship work – and of how, when it comes to love, timing is sometimes everything. An unforgettable story with writing that sparkles: a gem of a read.

Holly Williams has written a stunning, skilful, deftly drawn, cockle-warmer of a novel that somehow sweeps you through half a century while feeling like a leisurely afternoon. Prose so good I couldn’t stop underlining.

A fiercely original novel on the powerful effect circumstance and timing has on life, on love. A brave and astute write on politics, with feisty and complex protagonists in Albert and Violet, What Time Is Love? skilfully excavates the great questions of our modern age; the battle for equality, the difficulty that is marriage and the inter-generational effects of class on the individual. A wonderful, original and powerful debut by the very talented Holly Williams. She is wild and brilliant.

Heartwarming

A clever concept that casts a light on the different social mores of changing times, but remains a love story at its heart

An invigorating debut

An engaging debut [that] asks an eternal question: what if you meet the right person at the wrong time?

The debut novel from arts journalist Holly Williams is already being compared to David Nicholls’ One Day