‘I loved Patience, which is divinely uplifting despite being about the break-up of a marriage, and having a sad ending. The joy springs from the character of innocent heroine Patience, a stolidly accepting character who discovers sex after her third baby, and not with her husband, which is delicious and wicked in so many ways. She is a winning character, a devoted mother who adores her babies but not her husband who is poleaxed by this unwonted, immediate and reciprocal rapture with the musician Philip. Even though her life is immensely complicated by convention and also by conception she finds happiness, we find happiness too, in her story, which is full of tenderness and generosity and hope.’