Ann Quin was one of the major figures in a group of experimental writers who emerged in Britain during the 1960s. Although, unlike others in this group, she did not concern herself with literary manifestos or even, initially, regard herself as an experimental novelist, her work reveals a growing concern with the technical possibilities of the novel and with the articulation of areas of experience that had largely been ignored by writers of the previous decade. Her early work has, in fact, been most frequently likened to the novels of Natalie Sarraute, both in its techniques and also in its attempt to capture the fleeting and subterranean movements of her characters' minds and feelings. The later novels are perhaps closer to the work of more contemporary writers like Robert Creely and Alan Burns in their development of a more fragmented and apparently random organization of material and a...