‘This is the finest Great War novel since Susan Hill's ‘Strange Meeting’. Louisa Young weaves the experiences of her characters using an urgent, theatrical, staccato style that is probably best appreciated as an audio book, especially when read by the phenomenal Dan Stevens, who invests the characters with an immediately recognisable individuality whether they are thinking, writing, speaking – or, indeed, desperately trying to speak’
Independent on Sunday

‘Every once in a while comes a novel that generates its own success, simply by being loved. Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You inspires the kind of devotion among its readers not seen since David Nicholls’ One Day’
The Times

‘Birdsong for the new millennium’
Tatler

‘Powerful, sometimes shocking, boldly conceived, it fixes on war’s lingering trauma to show how people adapt – or not – and is irradiated by anger and pity’
The Sunday Times

‘[A] tender, elegiac novel. Others have been here before, of course, from Sebastian Faulks to Pat Barker, but Young belongs in their company’
Mail on Sunday

‘Unmissable … in crisp poignant prose Young explores what war really means in terms of mental anguish, while cleverly commenting on class and sex’
Marie Claire

‘Weaving heartbreakingly painful irony, heroic sacrifice, human weakness, vanity, tragedy and the purest of loves, you’ll be left sobbing and grasping onto any hope that all is not lost amid the poppies, the guns and the hospital beds’
Easy Living

‘A memorable and unusual novel which explores new ground in the literature of the Great War’
Linda Grant

‘This novel is a triumph’
Elizabeth Jane Howard