I very much admired the pace of the story, the changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings . . . I enjoyed it very much, and thought it was even more successful than The Anniversary in keeping the reader’s interest and sympathy to the very last page.
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
Pity, remorse and embarrassment are common reactions in sensitive Western Europeans who visit the countries which used to be cut off by the Iron Curtain. How lucky we were in comparison to the deprived and oppressed people who emerged into a kind of freedom so few years ago. What a weight of terrible history bears down on those who live in the lands of concentration camps and communism. Did we deserve our good fortune, or must we take responsibility for failing to rescue Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? Ann Swinfen has used all these complicated emotions in a novel with parallel strands of place (Hungary and provincial England) and of periods (wartime, revolution and the present-day)…I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel, especially the informative Hungarian sections…a novel of character…[and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained.
JESSICA MANN, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
An original and compelling novel from the author of the highly praised The Anniversary.
PUBLISHING NEWS
I read and enjoyed Ann Swinfen’s first novel, The Anniversary, and was delighted when this new one [The Travellers] arrived. And I wasn’t disappointed, for here is another absorbing, deftly interwoven story which keeps the reader intrigued and interested from beginning to end…Swinfen is a skilled writer, creating living, breathing characters that leap off the page. A highly satisfying read.
SANDRA DYSON, HULL DAILY
