Sadie Summerfield has the perfect husband, but then she falls in love with someone else...
"This, for me, was to be an exploration – and it had to be an unflinching one – of what it is to fall in love. Simple as that."
'The descriptions of marriage and other relationships are as probing and as subtle as anything in Henry James. Dunn's dazzling use of language is a pleasure in itself.'
—Sarah Lawson, The Tablet
'The heroine of Commencing Our Descent is Sadie, comfortably married to amiable, dependable Philip, and with the crippling feeling that life is just not happening. Then she meets Edwin, a reserved, unsmiling historian, and falls painfully in love… Dunn powerfully evokes the abyss opening up in the midst of the most mundane and surface-contented surroundings. She is a remarkable writer, a lyricist of ordinary life and ordinary people transfigured by extreme emotions.'
—Christopher Hart, The Telegraph
'Suzannah Dunn's writing is as English as treason – a world of twitching net-curtains, furtive sherry and baffled heterosexuality…Wonderfully evoking the erotics of 1471 and the terrors of "the caller has withheld their number", Dunn excels at exploring just how thin the line is between innocent conversation and erotic yearning… She keeps us in a state of suspended enamouration, constantly hovering between what might be and what never can be. In this sense she reads like an adulterous version of Jane Austin, but without the adultery. Like all innocent liaisons, this one proves to be as dangerous as the rest.'
Graham Caveney Daily Express
'In Commencing Our Descent, all the important events take place beneath the surface… Much has been said of Dunn's gift for precision, the gradual relaying of the minutiae of daily lives. What is often missed out in this general admiration is just how surprisingly tantalising this kind of writing can often be. Reading Dunn's work becomes an irresistible game of offering explanations and developing theories.'
Lesley McDowell Independent on Sunday
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