SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “Women Talking to Women.” Spectator 288, no. 9065 (4 May 2002): 39-40.

In the following review, Brookner assesses Unless as a charming novel that addresses the marginalization of women in society.

It is hard to describe what makes this resolutely old-fashioned novel [Unless] so beguiling. Even the themes are old-fashioned: feminism, sisterly solidarity, a hippy search for purity (of a non-specific kind), and yet it keeps one reading on, slightly puzzled, to an old-fashioned happy ending, or at least a comfortable one. Perhaps its charm comes from its simplicity, a quality rarely encountered either in fiction or in the real world. The curious title is taken almost at random from a group of words—thereof, theretofore, despite, since, hardly, not yet—which are used to link passages of writing that must be connected if they are to move a narrative along to another mode. They are essential words that...