Aphrodite’s Hat

Salley Vickers is the author of six novels, including the bestselling Miss Garnet's Angel, Instances of the Number 3, Mr Golightly's Holiday and, most recently, Dancing Backwards. She has worked as a dancer, an artist's model, a university teacher of literature and a psychoanalyst.

‘Aphrodite’s Hat is an assured debut, confidently ranging across moods and voices, and deftly pinpointing the moments when her characters most truly reveal themselves. Vickers [puts] love and art into the form.’ Observer‘Sparkles with dry wit and shrewd insights … terrific’ Mail on Sunday‘A box of delights … the emotional and technical range of this collection is both impressive and delightfully disorienting … Frank O’Connor famously said that is was possible for a bad writer to write a good novel, but only a really good writer could write a decent short story. Vickers’s first collection proves beyond doubt that she’s a really good writer.’ Frank Cottrell Boyce, Guardian‘A deceptively wild, seamlessly well-crafted collection’ The Times‘Beautifully simple with a devastating emotional climax … with the collection, Vickers proves herself a formidable and astute chronicler of the psychology of love’ Sunday TimesPraise for Salley Vickers:‘Salley Vickers is a writer whose subtle intelligence and unobtrusive command of narrative I always enjoy. She sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand, and she knows how the world works; and these qualities are much rarer than they should be. She's a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.’ Philip Pullman'If you enjoy the work of Marilynne Robinson, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Salter or Anita Brookner, you should be reading Vickers. All these authors reflect, with grace and gravity, on life's moments of sorrowful epiphany.' Michael Dirda, Washington Post‘There is something rare and special about Vickers as a novelist. In exploring the connections between faith and imagination, art and redemption, religion and science in an intelligent, unusual but very readable way, she manages to touch something buried deep in all of us. It gives her work a quietly compelling quality.’ Peter Stanford, Independent