SOURCE: “More Than Just Making Do,” in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 85, September 15, 1989, p. 34.

In the following positive review of Fludd, Gerrard contrasts Mantel's novel with Elaine Feinstein's All You Need.

In the interior, dreamy worlds of Elaine Feinstein's previous fiction, the nostalgia of remembered grief floods the present. One of her novels is called The Survivors and its title describes most of Feinstein's characters, who (often because they are Jewish, eastern European, and have lived through the horrors of world war two) have been violated by the past. All You Need’s characters are survivors of a very different kind. They are not looking back over their shoulders, but assessing the present and near future. Elaine Feinstein's latest novel, set in the late eighties of dilapidated inner city London, is more contemporary than any of her others; it lacks their plangency and tangy pain, and is instead shrewd...