SOURCE: King, Francis. “Too Much Goes into a Best Cellar.” Spectator 269, no. 8569 (3 October 1992): 30-1.

In the following review, King asserts that Daughters of the House is Roberts's most successful novel to date but finds it lacking in plot structure and character development.

The past is a palimpsest: so many conflicting memories and imaginations have scrawled their messages across it that it is often impossible and always difficult to decipher the truth. This is the basic theme of Michèle Roberts's sixth and—since it has won her place on the Booker short-list—most successful novel to date [Daughters of the House].

The past for Thérèse and Léonie, cousins of exactly the same age, is literally buried under sand in the wine cellar of the old Normandy farmhouse in which they grew up, now allies and now enemies, in the immediate aftermath of the war. It...