The judges praised it as: "Menacing, compelling and beautifully written." “This is a dark book, but an extremely funny one…A brilliantly paced debut”---Daily Mail
"A striking debut novel... a convincing, true voice" ---Financial Times
"Powered by the same sort of confidently rendered literary suspense that propelled Donna Tartt’s 1992 thriller, “The Secret History,” onto best-seller lists… It is one of the achievements of this novel that Ms. Adams makes Ginny such an intriguingly unreliable narrator that the reader is continually kept off balance." ---New York Times Books of The Times Hush, Hush, Sister Dearest, Your Fall Was an Accident---By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: July 8, 2008
“This suspenseful first novel is set in a crumbling Dorset mansion and features two aging sisters, reunited after a separation of nearly fifty years. Virginia is the sensible older sister who stayed, carrying on the family tradition of lepidopterology, while the reckless and free-spirited Vivien left to lead a cosmopolitan life in London. The story, told from Virginia’s eerily limited perspective, involves their parents’ descent into sadistic and capricious behavior, an accident in Vivien’s youth that left her unable to have children, and a plan that she had for her husband to impregnate Virginia instead. Adams creates an engrossing atmosphere of gothic mystery, but many of the psychological dramas come to feel like set pieces rather than like genuine conflicts.”---The New Yorker
“….a striking debut novel… also, in its quietly idiosyncratic way, a novel of ideas.”---Susan Hill
“a gothic tale of madness, sibling rivalry and lepidoptera. Adams is a skilful, entertaining storyteller”---The Guardian
“Damaged families, psychological drama and ghosts... Adams succeeds in carefully building up an atmosphere of penumbral suspense, creeping towards a tense climax”---Literary Review
“a superbly written, sinister tale of sibling suspicion”---Woman and Home
"This is a dark book, but an extremely funny one, recalling Mark Haddon and Barbara Trapido by turns. A brilliantly paced debut." ---Daily Mail
"Whatever Happened to Baby Jane comes to Devon, in Adams’s gothic tale of madness, sibling rivalry and lepidoptera... Adams is a skilful, entertaining storyteller" ---The Guardian
"Adams succeeds in carefully building up an atmosphere of penumbral suspense, creeping towards a tense climax" ---Literary Review
“Ingenious… twisting and teasing… The book’s real fascination [is] watching the author play her mischievous game of bluff with the reader.”---The Independent
"As vivid and disturbing as anything you’ll read all year" ---Scotsman
"A chilling contemporary gothic... This genuinely eerie thriller is guaranteed to appeal to the same wide readership that propelled Diane Setterfield’s suspenseful The Thirteenth Tale to the top of the best-seller lists" ---Booklist
“Disturbingly fab”---The Observer
THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, has also been shortlisted by The Authors’ Club for its Best First Novel Award 2009. The books were selected by club members and the winner will be chosen by guest adjudicator, Man Booker Prize-nominated author Philip Hensher. The award will be presented in London on 23rd March.