[1] It was described by Hilary Mantel as "A wonderful debut – witty, polished, fluent and effortlessly entertaining" and by the judges of the Costa Award as a "delightful book ... full of tall tales and fantasy".
[2] Writing in The Guardian, Henry Shukman commented that "In his second novel, set in contemporary São Paulo, Scudamore does not embed a transplant from his own culture in foreign soil.
[4] Following the publication in 2013 of his third novel, Wreaking,[5] the BBC Today programme interviewed Scudamore inside the grounds of the derelict Severalls Hospital in Colchester, where he explained how visits to such sites, rendered defunct by the Care in the Community Act, had directly inspired the book.
[6] The novelist Alan Warner described Wreaking as "an immersion in the physical and psychic ruins of a contemporary Britain which enchants and disturbs, lures and repels".
Edward Docx wrote of this "dark, tender, troubling novel" that "it is impossible to read these pages and not to think of the present blight of emotionally cauterised boarding-school politicians whose various pathologies, fantasies and defence mechanisms Britain must continue to endure.