'A graceful novel … its humour is an antidote to the sadness at its core – the loss of youth, of love and the flight of innocence.’
- Irish Independent
'The interweaving of different times and points of view is so cleverly and lightly done, it becomes like a dance routine.The reader effortlessly goes with the rhythms. And it’s funny, too – sadly funny.’
- Margaret Foster
'Floats beneath the callused surface of rural life past and present…imprinting itself on the reader’s mindwith the sort of surefooted, yet subtly unfamiliar stamp that marks a true original.'
- Irish Times
'Evans approaches nourishment, guilt, sexual prohibition with a maturity of voice, a calm steady temperatureand a narrative clarity…As well as providing a hearty excoriation of the oppressive religious and national structures that force her characters to repeat stultified or inherited roles, Evans examines the question of what constitutes health…there is a sense in which the characters of No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors are allowed to be less blunt, more human than those in her other novels. Although driven hard by the plot’s good strong melodrama, bursting with unrequited loves and cruel rejections, self hatreds and remorse, they are allowed the poetry and benignity of the oblivious, and for the first timein Evans’s fiction, the eys of the distanced narrator –maybe a quiet approximation of a God. Something is lost, some sense of urgency and rawness that the earlier books had. What is gained is a gravitas, no less angry and righteous, that is both self-consciously literary and humane; and a narrative judgement that is good-humoured, knows when to withhold and when to tell, and lifts the novel well beyond the mundane needs of a happy ending into something a lot more effecting and robust.'
- Ali Smith, Times Literary Supplement
‘A lovely and astonishing book…moving and beautifully written.'
- Jennifer Johnston
‘A very fine piece indeed…an intriguing and entertaining tale of religious fanaticism and repressed passion.’
- The Sunday Tribune
