'Angelica impresses first as a clever send-up of the late Victorian novel, and then becomes its own very original thing. It is engrossing, deeply moving, and — precisely because it is moving — very frightening.'

Stephen King

'Phillips's spellbinding third book cements this young novelist's reputation as one of the best writers in America, a storyteller who combines Nabokovian wit and subtlety with a narrative urgency that rivals Stephen King's... The novel thus unfolds like some infernally complex piece of origami... [A] profoundly unsettling achievement.'

(The Washington Post (Best Fiction of 2007 List))

'The real technical achievement here is the gospel-like division of the narrative...Most importantly, nothing distracts us from the genuinely chilling aspects of Constance's tale. The author has honoured James's definition of a proper ghost story, "the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy". He has once again "roused our dear old sacred terror".

(The Australian)

'Fans of Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White or Charles Paliser's sublime The Quncunx will appreciate the literary reverse-engineering in Arthur Phillips's accomplished pastiche of the Victorian ghost story...[a] subtle revisiting of the of the late Victorian novel's form and content.'

(The Age * book pick of the week*)

'Nothing is as it appears in this exquisitely crafted novel...Phillips evokes the plush parlours and churning streets of Victorian England in precise ad bewitching prose. Equally impressive, his rendering of the grey city's living ghosts; wounded protagonists whose buried histories might be the most frightening thing of all...Angelica is a ghostly chiller, yes, but it also triumphs as an analysis of memory and a portrait of a dysfunctional marriage.'

(Who Weekly)

'Comparisons to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw have already abounded, and it’s a compliment Phillips deserves. Yet Angelica is more than just a thoroughly convincing homage. Phillips presents its murky events from four characters’ standpoints, each typically effacing core testimonies of the last. It’s soon obvious that supernatural intrigue will give way to the lush furnishing of fragile psyches, and Phillips proves a deep sensitivity to the quiet anguish and emotional vagaries which plague the isolated and misunderstood. If mishandled, Angelica might have arrived deader than the spectres which may or may not beleaguer its titular tot. But Phillips nails it. In fact, I’m worried it has, at this early juncture, already spoiled me for fiction this year – it’s that good.'

(Readings Monthly)

'A spectacular, ever-proliferating tale of mingled motives, psychological menace, and delicately told crises of appetite and loneliness.'

(The New Yorker)

'a powerful, engrossing book'

(Daily Telegraph)

'A charming novel in which old-fashioned phantoms cleverly give way to Freudian nightmares.'

(The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice))

'A culturally authentic masterpiece... Angelica is bold and clever, its setting rich and provocative. Its unsettling story line unearths deep wells of intense human trauma and deception.'

(USA Today)

'Arthur Phillips is one brainy, clever, talented writer... Phillips masters the alternately delicate and overwrought language and conventions of Victorian ghost stories ... raises far-reaching questions about the elusiveness of cause and effect and, especially, certainty.'

(The Boston Globe)

'A symphony of psychological complexity and misdirection in four increasingly tricky movements displays the varied wares of the gifted Phillips.... Phillips juggles possibilities almost as adroitly as did Henry James in this novel's likely inspiration, The Turn of the Screw – and he ups the ante in successive narratives... Elegant writing abounds, as do probing characterizations and flashes of wit... An impressive step forward for the versatile Phillips, who continues to engage, surprise, and entertain.'

(Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))

'Phillips’s impressive third novel uses four linked viewpoints to explore class, gender, family dynamics, sexuality and sciences... Captures period diction and detail brilliantly. At its strongest, the multiple-viewpoint narration yields psychological depth and a number of clever surprises.'

(Publishers Weekly)

'Angelica turns unreliability into a burning existential, psychological question and an essential condition of the world as we know it... Phillips has pulled off an impressive pastiche of the Jamesian aesthetic without sinking into sheer imitation... Angelica is a psychological detective story without the detective... It is left to the reader to fire up their inner Sherlock Holmes and piece together the remains of these shattered Victorian lives into a coherent tale. Phillips may not supply the answers, but he has crafted some elegant shards.'

(San Francisco Chronicle)

'A well-crafted and beautifully-written novel ... Read it in front of a fire on a cold, wintery night.'

(Toowoomba Chronicle )