Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks.

A clever, fishy little novel...all voice, half poetry and half snarl.

For Tonks, love is its own thing, separate from both sex and its inverse, marriage, a dreaded vulnerability that could strike at any moment if one enjoys life a little too much.

Writing like this—a bit of Rhys, a bit of Knut Hamsun, a bit of Wyndham Lewis, a bit of Muriel Spark, overlaying the everlasting Shakespeare/Austen/Brontë/George Eliot marriage drama—is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London, between Hangover Square and Carnaby Street.

This is an exaggeratedly domestic novel, whose action unfolds in rooms gorged with furniture and objects, all brimming with meaning. Sophie knows how her mother is feeling based on the pitch of her iron’s hiss; clocks are always ticking or being wound when Philip is near or on the mind—he himself “had a clock buried in his flesh.” These objects, furnishings, and many, many articles of clothing are described with tender care and in vivid color.

If Tonks’s literary career was on its deathbed when she wrote The Halt, her style was still brilliantly alive…The liquidity of Tonks’s sentences, the deftness of her humor, makes it hard to understand how writing became such a source of torment for her. Tonks left us with this odd child, this Frankensteined novel—a trembling, emotional, sensitive bildungsroman stitched inside a flashy comic-novel facade.

Graceful prose, a devastatingly good ear for dialogue, a marvelous way with supporting characters—Sophie's mother, Philip's father, and their wise friend Pussy are carefully etched gems—and a sensibility which probes beneath her surface wit make Ms. Tonks a writer to conjure with.