SOURCE: Joughin, Sheena. “A Soubrette among the Espaliers.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5123 (8 June 2001): 23.

In the following review, Joughin observes that the stories in Playing Sardines include many of Roberts's recurring themes but comments that the stories are underdeveloped.

In 1979, The Women's Press inaugurated its fiction list with Michèle Roberts's first novel, A Piece of the Night. Fourteen more books have consolidated her position within a particularly female enclosure. Her preoccupations are with mothers and daughters, with female saints, and the lessons to be learnt from their journeys to canonization, the reclamation of history, particularly as told in France (Roberts is half French), and with her relationship to Catholicism and to God, who is very much the Freudian “exiled father” throughout her work. Food has also featured, the sensuality of its pleasures somehow bound up with those of story-telling. In Food, Sex and God (1998), she explained that she...