"Gray has the look of a latter-day William Blake, with his extravagant myth-making, his strong social conscience, his liberating vision of sexuality and his flashes of righteous indignation tempered with scathing wit and sly self-mockery." -- Los Angeles Book Review "This work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom." -- Publishers Weekly "A riotously comic, up-to-date Victorian romance . . . deft and frolicsome." -- Boston Globe "Gray here retells a tale that amalgamates Frankenstein and Candide . . . Along the way Gray offers delightful conversation, a tricksy triple ending, and some very witty writing." -- Washington Post Book World "Bella Baxter surely merits a place among the holy innocents of literature--Lemuel Gulliver, Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Prince Kropotkin and Holden Caulfield . . . Bound to call to mind other acidic commentaries on human folly--Rasselas, Tristram Shandy, Candide. But can it be that Gray, with his fierce Hibernian contempt for 20th Century solutions for age-old problems, is the most piercing thorn on the bush?" -- Chicago Tribune "Witty and delightfully written." -- New York Times "Lewis Carroll and Conan Doyle are acknowledged, but the authors Gray really revises are Sterne and Diderot, both comically self-analytic, Defoe, the creator of strong women, and Samuel Johnson or Voltaire, profound allegorists of the search for a good society . . . Poor Things is amusing and admirably angry, compassionate, and ironic as it looks in 1992 at the early days--modern as well Victorian--of a better nation." -- Times Literary Supplement (London) 'A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book' -- London Review of Books "Visionary, ornate and outrageous." -- The Independent "A brilliant marriage of technique, intelligence, and art." -- Kirkus Reviews "An unexpected final twist doesn't make the novel seem trivial but, on the contrary, gives the vivid melodrama a retrospective gravity. You become aware that this odd book has been a great deal more than entertaining only on finishing it. Then your strongest desire is to start reading it again." -- The Spectator