"Set out in the form of a woman looking back on her life, Susan Knight's first novel is by times reflective, angry, abrupt, downbeat and quite powerful... There is not much hope in the book, but a strain or two of black humour does creep in now and then as when the butcher's elder son comes to the house done up in female attire and convinces his parents that he is the younger son's latest flighty girlfriend.

Every so often Ms Knight provides paragraphs of straight information about this, that and the other. At first this puzzled me, but then I came to the conclusion that this the narrator finding these things out and that they are little cornerstones to fix her in moments of transient sanity.

A short novel, then but an interesting one. Ms Knight is to be complimented for the daring of her experimentation and for having the courage to write about despair without herself despairing. Original and engaging, The Invisible Woman deserves to be widely read."

Vincent Banville, The Sunday Press

"It's a bit risky to say that there's humour in this book, with its obsessive internal monologue; maybe it's all deadly serious and it is the style which carries this unintended wit. Judge for yourselves but do give it a try, for this is quite a compelling novel of a woman's search for -- well, her own identity, I think, and the identity of some of the other characters in her story, some of whom are or could be, aspects of herself.

If this seems a rather fractured account of the story, I plead guilty. The story itself is fractured, but the abrasive voice which links the different elements, like muscle linking bones, has a convincing fibre and justifies the difficulties of style and sequence. Reading this book is rather like doing a jigsaw in the dark: you feel it rather than see it."

Mary Leland, the Cork Examiner

"The most depressing novel I have ever read,"

Deryck Payne, friend.