"A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise." --Will Self

"A shockingly beautiful innovative voice in which the sublime and laughter are perfectly matched." --Andrew Gallix

"Medina's oeuvre mistranslates that of Borges. It is Borges's notion of mistranslation at work throughout. In the mode of Angela Carter and all those fantastic girls dallying in their bloody chambers. the trim metaphysical gestures and summarised plots contained in Medina's work re-render the marvelousness of fairy stories. The luminescent Marina Warner would feel most at home here." --Richard Marshal, 3: AM Magazine

"Susana Medina's teasing tale leads us into a labyrinth of interlinked questions, an echo-chamber of deceptive answers. Rather like the fetishism that is its guiding thread, the novel operates an endless deferral of meaning through a series of bewitching substitutes. The quest to understand the possibly shoe-centred relationship of her parents plunges the narrator into adventures, encounters and reflections--in both senses--that encompass ghost-writing and forgery, orthopedics and vagina dentata, Buñuel and Freud, amid visits to nursing homes, the art world, S&M clubs and toyshops. Like her narrator, Medina is a Spaniard in London whose rich yet unfathomably offbeat language voices a mix of satire, comedy and philosophy propelled by a disarmingly down-to-earth plot involving bedsits and money worries. This is ultimately a story about tenderness, for both people and the objects they live through; a novel of ideas rooted in the senses, glittering, strange and humane." --Lorna Scott Fox, London Review of Books