True Romance - Reviews
I think it's an extraordinarily valuable book. I think she's an extraordinarily valuable writer, because she's able to pull out of her subconscious the feelings that most of us are unable to get out, because they are so shocking - Celia Brayfield, BBC Radio 4
Zahavi's dangerous prose draws us down into the unknown world beneath the skin. The language is sub-Orton, with a generous helping of Pinter. The result is powerful, with the painful exposure of a Francis Bacon painting - Patrice Chaplin, author 'Into the Darkness Laughing'
Rife with dangerous games - Times Literary Supplement
She writes wonderfully; she is witty and knowing and manipulates words with real genius...Describing the book in a family newspaper is impossible. Suffice to say that it is both blacker and dirtier than Dirty Weekend - Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph
Sophisticated pornography - Rebecca Abrams, The Guardian
Helen Zahavi's new novel is disturbing. Publishers reach for the word when they want to praise, as though complacency was the sole feature of the human condition and its overthrow the sole duty of art, but sometimes it retains the meaning most dictionaries give to it. Helen Zahavi's new novel is very disturbing indeed - Ian Bell, Glasgow Herald
An everyday tale of sado-masochistic troilism - Harvey Porlock, The Sunday Times
Danger and violence are Helen Zahavi's stock-in-trade - Cressida Connolly, Tatler
Elegantly depraved - Jane Shilling, author 'The Stranger in the Mirror'
Beware any sweet expectations of Helen Zahavi's True Romance - the title is darkly ironic. Zahavi writes about a sexual troika whose dangerous games upturn preconceptions about victims and aggressors - Madeleine Kingsley, She
Beautiful, elegant, stylish, graphic, unputdownable and quite, quite terrible. Zahavi has either blown the whistle on sisterhood in a deed of unparalleled treachery or she has produced a small and perfectly formed masterpiece - Sally Vincent, The Sunday Times
Both menacing and erotic, the story becomes virtually hypnotic - Tim Manderson, Publishing News
A direct sado-masochistic descendant of the French school of languid sexual terror, best exemplified by Pauline Reage's The story of O - Deborah Bosley, Literary Review
True Romance is no Hotel du Lac - Nigella Lawson, The Times
Zahavi writes with a deadpan refinement, a dark, flippant irony, of her trio's cruel games...The effect is all the more disturbing for being perversely seductive - Nicholas Clee, The Bookseller