SOURCE: Barrow, Andrew. “Food for Puzzled Thought.” Spectator 282, no. 8893 (16 January 1999): 30.

In the following review, Barrow describes Fair Exchange as an “extremely juicy historical romance.”

This short and extremely juicy historical romance [Fair Exchange] starts with a French peasant woman called Louise summoning a priest. She has something dreadful to confess about her early life. Only at the end of the novel do we learn her terrible secret.

Cliff-hanging chapter-endings and constructions seem to be one of Michèle Roberts's specialities and during the first 80 or so pages of this book I was transfixed by her fine, light, almost two-dimensional technique and by her rapidly evoked portraits of life in London and France some 200 years ago.

Then for a short while a cloud seemed to descend on the narrative and I found myself caught up in a sort of feminist dream, imprisoned in a community of pregnant women all...