Winner of the Kafka Prize
“The generosity with which Mary Reilly is imagined, the elegance of Martin’s writing and the depth of her engagement with her title character make it a memorable and absorbing experience.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Valerie Martin creates memorable characters: the pompous butler…an unctuous landlord…and the utterly convincing Mary, with a housemaid’s eye, a servant’s rigorous sense of place-and a sufferer’s hard won dignity.”
—Newsweek
“Mary Reilly is an achievement-creativity skating exhilaratingly on thin ice.”
—The New York Times
“Mary is a remarkable character…. A marvelous performance.”
—USA Today
“Haunting…. Powerful…. Mary Reilly’s voice…casts a spell from the beginning: we turn the pages, furiously compelled, because we must know more about her.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Entrancing and elegant…. A seamless retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde story that is both a compliment and a complement to the original.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“Mary Reilly is intensely cinematic, highly dramatic, suspenseful, stirring and entirely absorbing…. Mary Reilly is magnificent.”
—The Kansas City Star
“Mary Reilly is a virtuoso work, a meticulously crafted, resplendently written story…. Authentic in its abundance of historical detail, it is also unbounded in Martin’s imaginative exploration of the psyche of a young girl.”
—Daily News