By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Elizabeth Smart’s passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as ‘Like MADAME BOVARY blasted by lightning … A masterpiece’.

Reviews

‘Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightening … A masterpiece.’ Angela Carter
‘At some point every good reader comes across “By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept”. And he or she recognises an emotion essential and permanent to us.’ Michael Ondaatje
‘A revelation…This short, powerful work has a profound influence on me and was one of the factors that made me want to be a writer.’ Beryl Bainbridge
‘I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such masterpieces of poetic prose in the world.’ Brigid Brophy
‘Explores a passion between a man and two women, one of them his wife – a love despairing and triumphant upon which the reader may gaze, awed, appalled, or even, perhaps, envious.’ The Times
‘Few writers have ever captured the full honesty of what passion means as shockingly and as piercingly as Smart. Today, its force still strikes us hard in the face, a beautiful and bloody blow.’ Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday
‘Constructed as a single, sustained climax, it is like a cry of ecstasy which, without changing volume or pitch, becomes a cry of agony.’ Spectator
‘The emotion, the truth and abject affliction comes through…to move the reader, and even to awe him.’ London Review of Books