Mark Bostridge's innovative biography…weaving episodes of his own emotional life into hers and producing something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace...a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read.

Daily Telegraph

In this gloriously rich and capacious book, the biographer Mark Bostridge sets out to unravel the story of Adele, the promising girl who was born into republican France's equivalent to a royal family yet spent most of her adult life being unravelled by love… What makes Bostridge's offering so compelling is that much of his book is taken up with the process of writing a deeply researched non-fiction book.

The Sunday Times

It's the saddest story ever told - and told so beautifully that you wish it would never end. The author's search for the truth about Victor Hugo's daughter carries him across oceans and into the darkest corners of his own past. It's an unforgettable journey.

Ferdinand Mount, author of Kiss Myself Goodbye

A haunting and utterly engrossing book – not just a brilliant study of Adele Hugo's obsessive and unrequited love, but full of revelations about the biographer himself, as he pursues the truth about her life, and finds in the process many parallel truths about his own.

Claire Harman, author of Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart

Profound, shattering, and utterly immersive.

Frances Wilson, author of Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

This excavation of a buried woman – covered by the sands of time, hearsay, rumours that attach to celebrity, and her own misinformation – sifts the very practice of biography. As a strange story of an obsession comes to light, Bostridge questions our reliance on documentation and challenges the illusion of objectivity with the biographer's own obsessiveness as he finds touching parallels in his own life that bring him closer to elusive truth.

Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot's Hidden Muse