The Beauties and Furies

`Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness, and never asks if the reader wishes to be so furiously enlightened and instructed, but takes it for granted that this is the function of fiction.’ -- Angela Carter * London Review of Books * `I cannot see how anyone can deny Miss Stead's position as the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf.’ * New Yorker * `It’s not easy to explain how much pleasure there was in reading Christina Stead’s second novel The Beauties and Furies…It is such a dynamic novel, rich with wonderfully complex characters and a compelling storyline…The Beauties and Furies is a brilliant novel.’ * ANZ Lit Lovers * `Stead paints an enticing, kinetic picture of Parisian café life and rented lodgings, friendly prostitutes and dissipated journalists, a sort of update of A Moveable Feast spiced with the rising threat of fascism. She also shows the influence, as the helpful introduction notes, of Joyce’s Ulysses, with a resourceful lexicon of wordplay, stream of consciousness and bravura passages that stand out from her conventional prose the way Marpurgo’s evil overshadows the small sins of adultery. A welcome reissue of an intriguing, atmospherically rich work.’ * Kirkus Reviews, starred review *