The L-Shaped Room is a disappointing first novel about a pregnant girl who is thrown out of house and home and has to go live in a nasty little room in Fulham to await her baby. It's disappointing because Miss Reid Banks has got such a good theme: how do people treat an unmarried mother nowadays, how do they react to her, and most important, how does she react, and how does she feel as those unwanted months go by? But Miss Reid Banks chucks her opportunity away in a conventional boarding-house saga, all baked beans and hearts of gold. There is a great deal about bed bugs which I can't help thinking wouldn't have been necessary if the heroine had had the sense to move into one of the many London boarding houses that don't have them.

Keith Waterhouse, "New Novels: 'The L-Shaped Room'," in New Statesman...