There are few modern tales of first love and its disillusions that are as thoroughly realised, as brilliantly lewd, and as hilariously satisfying.
—Rachel Cusk
I am wildly jealous of anyone who hasn't yet read Barbara Trapido. They have yet to discover the joy of her often hilarious and always profound world.
—Maggie O'Farrell
I've given Brother of the More Famous Jack to dozens of people, and like me, they fall rapturously in love with Trapido's breezy, raunchy and unsentimental style.
—Maria Semple, The New York Times
Like other perfect but not extremely famous novels, [Brother of the More Famous Jack] has mostly been passed from people who adore it to people who have never heard of it . . . Meeting the Goldmans, through Katherine’s eyes, and falling in love with them (or at least the idea of them) was a tonic and a release: they were impossible and competitive and, like an overawed house guest, I wanted desperately to be one of them, or at least to be accepted into their midst.
—Sam Knight, The New Yorker
[Brother of the More Famous Jack] is ideally short, yet one wants to live inside it, in the charmed parenthesis it opens inside the daily grind . . . We should have been talking about Barbara Trapido all along . . . [the novel] strikes me as a pocket classic, a book that takes life seriously, earns its emotions and befriends the reader without getting all gooey about anything at all.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
I consider literary comfort food: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido.
—Lily King, Elle
The best possible company in this difficult world.
—Ann Patchett
The style is ... passionate, the jokes thick and fast, the emotions full and right, the humanity total and engulfing.
—Andrew Sinclair, The Times
A sort of Bohemian Brideshead Revisted.
—Times Literary Supplement
An unpretentious, very funny book … so goodhearted and innocent it makes you wish that somewhere life is like this.
—Dee Wells, The New York Times
I hope it is stocked by railway-station bookstalls. I hope railway-station bookstalls have to build extensions to house the necessary copies.
—Financial Times
Its high spirits are irresistible. Like Moll Flanders, the heroine is unstoppable.
—Sunday Telegraph
Think Brideshead Revisited set in the 1970s, only sexier and much funnier. It kills me that I didn't read it at university, when I really needed it.
—Meg Rosoff, New Statesman
The perfect book.
—Meg Mason
Funny, charming, teeming with life, and real.
—Nick Hornby
I adored it. Redolent of classics like The Constant Nymph with both its true voice and wonderfully sage and sanguine heroine.
—Sophie Dahl
Reading it again is as comforting as eating toast and Marmite between clean, fresh sheets.
—Rachel Cooke, Sunday Times
Brother of the More Famous Jack could be the book I recommended most often last year. It’s one of those magic finds . . . This gem captures a quick-witted woman’s coming-of-age. For fans of Helen Garner, Deborah Levy, Tessa Hadley, maybe Susie Boyt—all the brilliant bards of chosen mid-century squalor, in thrall to the erotic intellect.
—Brittany Allen, LitHub
