Highlights from Reviews of Mary Novik's Conceit

Here are some of my favourite quotations from the reviews of Conceit. Links to the full text of these reviews, and others, may be found on my News page.

"This exuberant debut is so forcefully imagined, it's hard to believe it emerged from a New World outpost like Vancouver."
GUDRUN WILL, Vancouver Review

“A magnificent novel of 17th-century London. . . . Conceit is a mind-expanding creation of a distant world . . . in often-exhilarating detail, seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted. . . . Reading Conceit is like settling into a multi-course feast that shifts your ideas of food, of the wonders that art can conjure from the staples of life. . . . Buy the book. Find a free weekend and a quiet place. Do not Google. Step away from the remote. Enter London, 1666, the blaze of death and life. Recall what it means to know a world through the surface of a page, created in the words of a gifted stranger, made uniquely yours by your own storehouse of experience and the mystery of your subconscious. Conceit will cut a reviving swath through your tech-addled world.”
JIM BARTLEY, The Globe and Mail

“How to write a review in 350 words that does justice to Mary Novik’s extraordinary debut novel Conceit? … Novik plunges us into the London of the Great Fire of 1666 as the book opens. She makes us smell the smoke and feel the heat, just as she shows us, a little later on, the longing that Pegge Donne (daughter of poet John) feels for her first love, Izaak Walton.... The book is a vision of ‘my seventeenth century,’ Novik writes in her acknowledgments, adding that she has ‘invented joyfully and freely.’ The result is as delightful as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and as erudite and readable as A.S. Byatt’s Possession.”
MARY SODERSTORM, Quill & Quire, starred review

"A powerful and passionate historical story vividly set in 17th-century England. . . . Fans of novels like A.S. Byatt's Possession and Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring will probably enjoy Novik's perspective on one of the great figures of English literature."
JOE WIEBE, The Vancouver Sun

Comments from Readers

"Few novels truly deserve the description 'rollicking' in the way Mary Novik's Conceit does. A hearty, boiling stew of a novel, served up in rich old-fashioned story-telling. Novik lures her readers into the streets of a bawdy seventeenth-century London with a nudge and a wink and keeps them there with her infectious love of detail and character. A raunchy, hugely entertaining read that will leave you at once satiated and hungry for more."
GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ, author of The Cure for Death by Lightening

"In this gorgeous, startling, deeply moving novel about the family of the poet John Donne, the mind is shown to be one of the body's most erogenous zones. A feast, a pageant, a seduction of words."
THOMAS WHARTON, author of Icefields

"A vivid and sensuous tale set in the world where passion and death are never far apart."
EVA STACHNIAK, author of Garden of Venus

"Read Conceit not for its foods and flowers and silks and seductions–though these are here in all their lusty Elizabethan richness–but for its prose. . . . Novik's writing couples the sacred and the sexy as neatly as Donne's own.
ANNABEL LYON, author of Oxygen

"I loved Conceit, the fully formed characters, the wonderfully evoked historical setting, but above all the passion that informs the narrative throughout. The writing is graceful and fluid and the rhythms remain with you long after you have put the book down. It would do the novel little justice to speak of it as merely a work of historical fiction. It is better described as a glorious exploration of the human heart."
BÉA GONZALEZ, author of The Mapmaker's Opera

Blogs and Websites

"Forget your high-school textbook anthologies! Mary Novik's Conceit is nothing like that! Hers is a brilliant and complex work featuring a sparkling cast of characters who step off the page as breathing--yea, sometimes panting."
CIPRIANO at BookPuddle

"This is a superbly discreet novel about Pegge Donne, a daughter of John Donne. It is a wonderful portrait in which the figure of John Donne also looms large in a setting believably evoked through well researched, unobtrusive detail. . . .The language of the novel is exemplary; several times a paragraph struck me as among the best I'd ever read. . . . Since I've a great interest in film I've spent some time since reading Conceit speculating on who I'd want to play the various roles; Pegge & John Donne would be plum roles & much could done with the scenes at St. Paul's burning during the Great Fire wherefrom Pegge retrieves the great effigy of her father. There is high drama at times but mostly it details Pegge's spiritual character & her relationships with her Father, Mother, Brothers, Sisters, Husband, & "friend" Isaac Walton. It is well worth reading."
JOHN CAMFIELD, posted on Amazon

"I'm not sure what to say about Mary Novik's novel Conceit. Brilliant and expertly written, the varied perspectives feel authentic and distinct; the characters who inhabit those perspectives are fully conceived and delivered. . . . As I turned the last page at 3 a.m. this morning, I couldn't help feeling I'd just visited an alien world in which many of my opinions about the legendary Dean of St. Paul's were turned upside down. And, perhaps, I had done."
INKSLINGER at The Overdecorated Bookcase