Conjures a tale that recalls vintage Michael Ondaatje ... delicate and sweeping

Daily Mail

This is fiction of the most graceful kind ... a quiet storm of imagery and emotions

Christian House, Independent on Sunday

I loved Painter of Silence. It was like entering a dream world that became more and more real, until I actually needed to get back to it. Her writing is so gentle and beautiful and takes you so confidently on a journey. I let myself be carried away. Heaven

Esther Freud

Painter of Silence insists on being recommended because of its unassertive originality, its sense of history, its knowledge of the unsaid and the unsayable, and - not least - its delightfully surprising ending

Paul Bailey, Independent

Harding writes with exquisite restraint ... Her deceptively simple prose gives a startling beauty to the ordinary, and evokes great depth of suffering

Guardian

Harding's writing has a careful, lilting fluency which nourishes a slow-burning momentum ... an adroit examination of our need for a home, and the terrible consequences of its loss

Philip Womack, Daily Telegraph