Rosalind Belben was born and brought up in Dorset and, after a nomadic life, has again made it her home. New editions of Is Beauty Good and Choosing Spectacles are also forthcoming from And Other Stories. Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 to Jewish parents of Italo-Russian, Romano-Levantine extraction. He is the author of some twenty novels, ten books of criticism, a memoir of his mother, the poet Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous stage and radio plays.

"Extremely beautiful, utterly convincing, and rivals anything by Virginia Woolf." --Melissa Harrison, The Guardian

"By turns shimmering and disquieting, Belben's exceptional voice deserves a resurgence." --Irenosen Okojie

"Deeply strange, uncompromising and extraordinarily powerful." --Jonathan Buckley

"So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer's mind." --Isabel Quigly, Financial Times

"From the publisher that brought Ann Quin back into print comes another lost classic from an English visionary. Rosalind Belben's work is both terrific and disconcerting, an essential read for lovers of extraordinary fiction." --Camilla Grudova

"Belben takes a brief but unforgettable foray into the mind of an isolated middle-aged woman who describes herself as "an unfortunate ghost." Readers will be glad to discover this striking narrative." --Publishers Weekly

"Belben's eye for the movement and texture of the natural world is extraordinarily acute and she has a poet's ear for language . . . A confession of fulfilment, of endless curiosity for, and love of life." --Selina Hastings, Daily Telegraph

"A seductively strange novel. In Belben's writing, time periods dissolve: the phenomenon of the medieval pageant is invoked; Robin Hood becomes a character; dreams are recorded; and desires rise up, then settle down." --Rhian Sasseen, Electric Literature

"Her heroine is a solitary woman who tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written." --Hilary Bailey, The Guardian

"Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature . . . An achievement to celebrate." --Maggie Gee, The Observer

"A complex, emotionally intense narrative with experimental shifts in style and tone, and vivid lyrical passages [. . .] Belben writes about nature with a poetic intensity that is quite wonderful, revealing a deep connection to the natural world, that her protagonist clearly shares." --Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts

Praise for the Author

"If the world includes Rosalind Belben and her words it cannot be considered an altogether regrettable place to be." --Harry Mathews

"A beautiful work . . . it says a great deal about the world we live in . . . more life-like and more alive than most fiction." --Michael Hamburger on Is Beauty Good

"Belben works her readers harder than many of her contemporaries--but the rewards of reading her, as of reading Proust, are that the work continues to haunt our minds long after we have put it down." --Philip Terry

"A testament to Belben's ability to give life and language to animals as well as humans. She does this without any sense of strain or anthropomorphism, through a rich and innovative use of language that never slips into the sentimental." --James Tait Black Prize for Fiction judges' citation for Our Horses in Egypt

Publisher: And Other Stories

Pub date: 2025-08-05

Length: 144 pages