Reviews

"Faber's writing is so dizzyingly accomplished that he is able to convince you that, just sometimes, the old stories really are the best ones."

"Nothing could have prepared [Faber's] readers for the sweep and subtlety of The Crimson Petal and the White. . . . Faber's is an immensely difficult project, and to carry it off he returns to the self-conscious reforming zeal, the bracing ethical assurance, the heartbreaking generosity and the sly rhetorical tricks of the great Victorian novelist."

"The Crimson Petal and the White is a marvel, an engaging whale of a novel."

"The Crimson Petal and the White [is] a book so vigorous and preternaturally delightful that a stylish brio enlivens even its weather reports. . . . A big, sexy, bravura novel that is destined to be surpassingly popular . . . wildly entertaining." -- Janet Maslin

"The Crimson Petal and the White [is] a burgeoning, buxom, neo-Victorian literary bodice-ripper about a prostitute in 1870s London. . . . Faber, a scholar of nineteenth-century culture and literature, shows his debt to Dickens, Balzac, and Stendhal. . . . Faber's tour de force is an enormously readable saga . . . stuffed with vivid characters. . . . The Crimson Petal and the White is escapist literature in the best sense."

"The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber's bulging, bawdy Victorian epic, is a gloves-off kind of novel, one not to be passed along lightly to your grandmother. Cocky and brilliant, amused and angry, the author is rightfully earning comparisons to observer extraordinaire Charles Dickens."