A Five Year Sentence simmers with the brutal. It runs red with the blood of Jean Hawkins's menses and her late deflowering, just as her Five-Year Diary (her retirement present) grows 'blood-red' with obedient ticks. For each of this extraordinary novel's raft of believably grey, lost, wanting-to-be-loved people from the wasteland tracts of outer London, living is a matter (in the narrative's favourite word) of colonise or be colonised. And Miss Hawkins is a colony…. It all adds up to an unbeatable account of yearning submission and bullying oppression among ordinary people….

Valentine Cunningham, "Poor Mouths," in New Statesman (© 1978 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 96, No. 2480, September 29, 1978, p. 416.∗