“Rosalind Belben, in Is Beauty Good, take the most extreme formal risks with painful elegance. . . . Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. She has a photographic eye for natural beauty, and is also tough-minded and funny.” —Maggie Gee, The Observer
“Spare, lucid prose, reminiscent of Woolf’s The Waves.” —Chistina Koning, The Guardian
“Deeply strange, uncompromising and extraordinarily powerful.” —Jonathan Buckley, The New Statesman
“In language and form, Belben’s writing was like no other, and remains startling.” —Paul Griffiths
“If the world includes Rosalind Belben and her words it cannot be considered an altogether regrettable place to be.” —Harry Mathews
“For Belben, the dreadful, the unforgettable, the raw, revolting are qualities that bring us to feel equally the marvel that is being alive. . . . Her books demonstrate that not all fiction has to appeal to that phantom creature ‘the common reader’ in order to be valuable. Being unappealing—letting the ugly in to work its maleficence at the level of the sentence of a narrative. . . . This has its own vast and life affirming reward.” —Kirsty Gunn, Literary Hub
“Belben works her readers harder than many of her contemporaries—but the rewards of reading her, as of reading Proust, are that the work continues to haunt our minds long after we have put it down.” —Philip Terry
“A beautiful work . . . it says a great deal about the world we live in . . . more life-like and more alive than most fiction.” —Michael Hamburger
“This eccentric polyphonic novel contains dozens of considerations of dreams, including dogs’ dreams and horses’ dreams as well as human beings’. Yet what makes [Is Beauty Good] extraordinary is Belben’s ability to capture in words the slippery state that is neither dreaming nor sleeping nor waking, but somewhere in the edgelands between all three . . . Exhilarating.”
—Lara Pawson, The Guardian (UK)
