Whatever You Love - Brossura

Doughty creates a haunting, heart-wrenching portrait. (Psychologies)

The opening chapter is electrifyingly painful. From then on the reader is spellbound ... the book is hauntingly believable ... so powerful is the evocation of raw emotion that, the day after i finished it, I woke up with that same feeling. It was some minutes before I realised I was still inside Doughty's book. (A N Wilson Readers Digest)

It is an extraordinarly opening, written with such taut understatement that the mother's grief is given a visceral power: we empathise with it immediately ... Whatever You Love is a masterfully constructed novel, at once gripping and tender ... The emotional power of Doughty's prose is such that the reader is complicit in Laura's journey from loss to retribution. Doughty forces us to confront the darkness that lies beneath the skin. The result is a brilliant and brutal novel that continues to unsettle long after the final page has been turned. (Observer)

Absorbing (Grazia)

A stunning tale of grief and the lengths to which a woman must go to come to terms with it. (Woman and Home)

Brilliant, disturbing, heart-wrenching. (Daily Mirror)

This powerful, disturbing and beautifully written novel is highly recommended. (thebookbag.co.uk)

'Louise Doughty is a courageous writer, willing to explore deeper territory with each book ... Doughty is excellent at small physical details of relationships with children - their scent and skin texture, memories the body retains even if the conscious mind can banish them ... Doughty excels at conveying the harrowing grief of Laura's bereavement and her slow emergence into a world entirely changed by the death of her daughter, and skilfully handles a tense and complex plot. This is a powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.' (Independent)

Brilliantly structured ... Like Zoë Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred. (Sunday Telegraph)

The brilliantly constructed narrative ... Doughty has crafted a character who's complex, but always genuine. A compulsive read, this is compelling and unsettling in equal turns (Northern Echo)