'Fletcher’s writing has a stringency and immediacy that makes The Word Burners both an excellent read and a neatly-crafted novel of ideas.'

'[A] novel about how hard it is to be a female academic, and how much harder it is to be a feminist academic. I must add it’s not dense or opaque: it has lots of melodrama, sexy scenes, drunken quarrels, deaths and so on – and it has got all the hooks that make for a good read and make you desperate to know how it’s going to end.'

‘In The Word Burners, Beryl Fletcher writes ordinary people with extraordinary style, revealing sisterhood in all its incarnations – blood, friendship, family, love – with pinpoint accuracy for the pain and a poignant hope for the possible.’