The Wonder

The most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes'

The most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes'

Her prose is airbound at times - an exhilarating celebration of rhythm, sway and leap

Darkens from an absorbing mystery into a touching reckoning... Most striking is the delicacy and power with which Evans depicts emotional disturbance

The story is complex, clever, seamlessly achieved, its many currents blending in harmony, sometimes in conflict, to recreate that sense of randomness and accident that resemble the truth of life in the chancy present...The author's passion burns on the page, along with an almost tactile relish of the act of writing itself

A serious work of art with sentences like ribbons of silk winding around a skeleton of haunting imagery... Evans was born to write this novel

The Wonder embraces its theme with great heart. It's hard not to be seduced by its talented, difficult hero

Evans interweaves the strands of her three-generation narrative with an exhilarating sense of place and period

Sparkles with mood, music and the sway of street life

Like the movement of the dancers it describes, it feels always, captivatingly, 'meant'

Evans...writes with eye-catching fluidity, gracefully pirouetting between Notting Hill in the 1990s, and the Caribbean a decade earlier

Diana Evans was a dancer before becoming a journalist and author. She has contributed to the Independent , Marie Claire , the Guardian , the Observer , Harper's Bazaar , the Daily Telegraph and many other publications, and holds an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her first novel, 26a , received a Betty Trask award, a nomination for the Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award. It was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers and has been translated into twelve languages. She lives in London.