Book Details

I was utterly absorbed in the language and the story and the world of it ... You know how it is when a writer draws into a place and you begin to feel it is more substantial than the one around you? That is how this book was for me. I truly loved it (Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry)

It's undoubtedly her most accomplished novel yet . Freud is a modern literary rarity: a born storyteller, poetic but never overwrought; thoughtful but never showy (Alex O'Connell, The Times)

A compelling tale beautifully told, Mr Mac & Me is as close to a perfect novel as anything I've read in a long time. I loved every page of it (Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto)

Mr Mac and Me is perhaps Freud's finest, most heartfelt book, written in shimmering prose (Herald)

I loved and admired Mr Mac and Me more than I can say (Francis Wyndham)

Esther Freud has a remarkable fluency of style . Atmospheric and elegant (Tatler)

This is an evocative, gentle rendering of an English village in wartime and a poignant portrait of life through a young enquiring boy's eyes (Daily Mail)

An elegiac novel of art, war and friendship . Since her first novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), Freud has created a series of convincing child narrators; without condescension or sentimentality, her novels capture painful transitions from innocence to experience . Her fine evocation of Mackintosh's melancholy on the home front, expressed in his painstaking watercolours of local flowers, celebrates the power of art to outlast both man-made and natural disasters (Sunday Telegraph)

Freud's novel is a tantalisingly oblique portrait of Mackintosh in his declining years, but also a personal story placed at the fulcrum of the era when commercialism replaced craftsmanship (Guardian)

There's a quality of luminous wonder too, captured in Freud's delicate, lyrical prose and the tenderness and warmth of her depictions of the various characters that make up village life. But it is Thomas, mysterious Thomas, and brusque, beleaguered Mac, who glow in this compelling story of art, friendship and war (Independent)