Kate Atkinson is one of the world's foremost novelists. She won the Costa Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her three critically lauded and prize-winning novels set around the Second World War are Life After Life, now an acclaimed BBC TV series starring Thomasin McKenzie, A God in Ruins (both winners of the Costa Novel Award) and Transcription. Her bestselling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. Jackson Brodie later returned in the novel Big Sky.
Brilliant. * Richard Osman * A heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s . . . Shrines of Gaiety sees Atkinson on her finest form . . . A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow . . . a peak performance of consummate control. -- Anthony Cummins * OBSERVER * Sharp, witty and fiendishly plotted ... you don't so much as read it as surrender to it * FINANCIAL TIMES, 'Best books of 2022' * Seduction, betrayal and larger-than-life characters that will have you hooked until the last page. * THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * Kate Atkinson is on deliciously acerbic form in Shrines of Gaiety ... exposing the underbelly of London nightlife in the roaring 20s * GUARDIAN, 'Books of the Year' * Atkinson has a plotter's mind: intricate, clever, satisfying. Shrines of Gaiety is all about life's tangled lines, intersections and synchronicities...The kind of fine-tuned observation that can produce an enormous, vibrant cast is quite something and I can think of few writers other than Dickens who can match it. Shrines of Gaiety is engrossing and fun, powered by subtle skills. * THE SUNDAY TIMES * This book is one to savour, for the energy, for the wit, for the tenderness of characterisation that make Atkinson enduringly popular. * GUARDIAN * As vividly filthy, populous, dangerous as anything described by Dickens, but writing is closer to Thackeray's... Atkinson is a novelist of unrivalled immediacy, authority, and skill. * FINANCIAL TIMES * Kate Atkinson is simply one of the best writers working today, anywhere in the world...she's a global treasure... [Shrines] is set during Jazz Age London, in all its fizzy madness and desperation for the new, the better, the hustle. Atkinson has a magician's ability to switch a reader's mood within a few paragraphs, and as dark as her stories can get, within them always shines a beacon of humanity. * GILLIAN FLYNN * Atkinson is a thoughtful writer with an astute understanding of 20th-century social history. This is the perfect novel for uncertain times, when comfort of a particularly English and nostalgic stripe is required. * THE TIMES *