Nuns and Soldiers

"Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime." –Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"As with Nuns and Soldiers, so with the condiiton of love: you want to know how it will turn out, but you certainly don't want it to end." –Martin Amis, The Observer

"Few writers have been able to describe the cataclysmic and humorous experience of love as well as Murdoch." –Karen Armstrong

"Murdoch at her best . . . the novel is, like life, full of surprises, and conveys a marvelous sense of underlying order and swarming randomnes together." –A.S. Byatt, New Statesman

"Dazzling . . . Engrossing . . . Like Proust and Henry James, Murdoch transports the reader to the stylish grace of other times and ways, but cleverly never lets us forget the reality just outside the door . . . comical and pessimistic, intelligent, and eccentric . . . Iris Murdoch's novels are a bit like life: The destination is uncertain, but the journey is, after all, what matters." –Barbara Phillips, The Christian Science Monitor