SOURCE: Sexton, David. “Down on the Farm.” Spectator 276, no. 8755 (4 May 1996): 29-30.

In the following review, Sexton lauds Trollope's treatment of the themes of love and loss through death, separation, and divorce in Next of Kin, asserting that Trollope possesses “the true novelist's gift of being able to involve the reader's fantasy.”

At his wife's funeral, Robin Meredith was asked by a woman in a paisley headscarf, whom he didn't immediately recognise, if he wasn't thankful to know that Caro was now safe with Jesus.

Nobody who has read Joanna Trollope would have any difficulty in guessing the author of the opening sentence of Next of Kin, so effectively has she created her own fictional world. It's all there immediately, rather like the old joke about the one-line story which contains all the essential themes (‘Fuck me, said the Bishop …’)

Already there is love and loss: Trollope always writes...