"Once I started it I was hooked. And when I realised that she hadn't been a brave and beautiful spy, I was double-hooked. Its truth is necessary and essential, and makes the last chapters terrifyingly poignant and moving." -- Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending
"A fascinating, complicated story." -- Entertainment Weekly
"Gripping." -- New York Times Book Review
"A most strange and compelling book driven by the writer's unsparing search for truth: now an optimistic hunt for a family heroine, now a study in female wiles of survival, now a portrait of one very ordinary person's frailty in the face of terrible odds." -- John le Carre
"A gripping excavation of a woman's secret past, Priscilla is also a fascinating portrait of France during the second world war, and of the many shadowy and corrupt deals made by the French with their Nazi occupiers." -- Caroline Moorehead
"As Shakespeare does his research, the mystery of Priscilla begins to recede....She is revealed as possibly less worthy-but maybe more intriguing...Our hunger to know what she thought and felt is a tribute to just how much of her he has been able to put on the page." -- New York Times
"The story that unfolded is remarkable, and his account of it is riveting....Priscilla is, like almost all biographies, necessarily incomplete, but as a picture of France during the dark years of the occupation it is wonderfully full of light and shade, sympathetic and highly intelligent." -- Wall Street Journal
"Fascinating....Shakespeare probes his aunt's wartime years with finesse and pathos....His reconstruction of Priscilla's life is meticulous and tantalizing." -- Boston Globe
"This mysterious story of the Occupation in France has all the qualities of a fascinating novel, with exquisite social, sexual and moral nuance." -- Antony Beevor
"In Priscilla, Nicholas Shakespeare captures the soul of a young Englishwoman who, to survive in Nazi-occupied France, is forced to make choices which few in England ever had to face. She remained her own unflinching judge and jury to the end." -- Charlotte Rampling
"Shakespeare has employed all his superb gifts to tell the picaresque tale of his aunt in occupied France. Priscilla is a femme fatale worthy of fiction, and the author traces her tangled, troubled, romantic and often tragically unromantic experiences through one of the most dreadful periods of 20th century history." -- Max Hastings
"Extraordinary true story of the author's aunt. A life of dark secrets, glamour, adventure and adversity during wartime." -- Woman & Home
"Thrilling.....An intimate family memoir, a story of survival and a quest for biographical truth." -- Tatler
"Remarkable....A detailed and vivid narrative. This is a moving, and constantly surprising story." -- The Independent
"A fine book, full of hurried journeys and secret liaisons, by one of Britain's best writers." -- Conde Nast Traveller
"A wonderful book....I have not read a better portrait of the moral impossibility of that time and place for people, like Priscilla, who found themselves trapped in it." -- Daily Telegraph
"A gripping narrative....Shakespeare offers a nuanced and detailed psychological study of the effect of the Second World War on an ordinary woman. The result is just as absorbing as any biography of a war hero." -- London Sunday Times
"Letters, journals and memories of family and friends are woven seamlessly with accounts of life in occupied Paris to reveal the precarious existence of a British woman in France during World War II....Intriguing." -- Daily Express
"Gripping....[An] extraordinary voyage into the truth....Priscilla brilliantly exposes the tangled complexities behind that question so easily asked from the comfort of a peacetime armchair: 'What would I have done?'" -- The Observer
"[A] wonderfully readable quest for answers....[Shakespeare] builds a nuanced, sensitive portrait of this sad and glamorous member of his family....As the life of Priscilla shows, surviving the occupation was too complicated an affair for any black-and-white verdict." -- The Economist
"A tantalizingly original perspective of the Second World War....In his engaging detective story, as he pieces Priscilla's war years together, Shakespeare shines a moving, intriguing light on the moral quandaries faces by ordinary citizens." -- London Sunday Times, Best Book of the Year Citation
"Impossible to put down." -- Mail on Sunday, a Book of the Year Pick
"An excellently researched, beautifully written and unflinching memoir." -- Evening News, (UK)
"Mesmerising....A tremendous portrait of a world of war that is only ever glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. It is a haunting, powerful book about the gaps in the record and about the terrible abysses that are revealed when they are filled in." -- Sydney Morning Herald
