The Palm House

This pristine book confirms Riley’s position among the finest novelists working today. Her sentences are crystalline and perfect, and her attention to the world is always acute and occasionally tender - I love this book, and am awed by Riley’s accomplishment – Sarah Perry, author of Death of an Ordinary Man

Outstandingly brilliant – Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

Gwendoline Riley is one of my favourite contemporary writers and The Palm House is the book of hers I love the most – Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour

Gwendoline Riley can draw character like nobody else … Her prose is so sharp you could cut yourself on it – Elizabeth Macneal author of The Burial Plot

Achingly sad and subversively funny … I read My Phantoms with great pleasure. It’s a wonderful combination of achingly sad and subversively funny, simultaneously sharp and tender, and always finely observed. The dialogue is pitch perfect. The relationships are agonising. It’s a subtle book, with big themes lightly drawn and precisely rendered, about how to live and how to love – Monica Ali author of Brick Lane

What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is – Kevin Barry author of Night Boat to Tangier

A novelist of uncompromising brilliance – Olivia Laing * Observer *

A writer of singular vision * Guardian *

Gwendoline Riley’s talent for making characters live, and her skill for identifying the essential moment, word or gesture, is immense – Chris Power, author of Mothers

One of the most exciting novels in years… Riley is as good at turning over our expectations as she is at turning sentences around… the final stretch of the book is so good its almost showing off, with comedy and tragedy side by side - John self

Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it’s worth it - Alex Clark TLS

Riley’s novels get under your skin – Alex Preston Observer

Gwendoline Riley is a genius – Claire Allfree Evening Standard


The Palm House confirms Riley as one of Britain’s best The Telegraph

A sly dark comedy about a long friendship between two prickly people enduring in the face of the world’s disappointments The Independent

One of our finest novelists of constrained fury: nobody writes better … Riley’s prose is sharp, her dialogue pitch-perfect, her exasperation channelled into devastating comedy Observer

Mesmerising The Telegraph

Painfully good The Times, ‘Books of 2026’

The Palm House might be my favourite novel of 2026 so far … It’s very funny and so full of pathos and horror … I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again – Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times

GWENDOLINE RILEY was born in London in 1979. She is the author of My Phantoms, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; of First Love, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction; and of Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, and Opposed Positions. She has also won a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, The Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.