Book review: Dancing Backwards

Since the word-of-mouth success of her first novel, Miss Garnett's Angel, Salley Vickers has established a reputation as a superior romantic novelist," said Lorna Bradbury in the Daily Telegraph. There is "something of Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner" about her books, which feature older women "stuck in loveless marriages, or who find love too late". In Dancing Backwards, the heroine, Violet, sets off on a cruise ship to America, to visit a man she once loved as a young woman, but let down. While pondering her two unhappy marriages, she learns how to ballroom dance. Though the book is not perfect, its portrait of Violet's "quietly difficult life" is a "triumph".

Vickers is more than just a "thinking lady's romance novelist", said Heather Thompson in the Sunday Telegraph: she is "cleverer, and grimmer than that". But although this novel is very good when it deals with Violet's "uneasy reminiscences", too many of the cruise ship characters are "two-dimensional". Even so, said Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, the book "packs a surprising emotional and intellectual punch".

Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers, Fourth Estate, 260pp, £14.99. The Week Bookshop £13.49 (including p&p)