Press Reviews

• Paula Hawkins

  Eerie and compelling, Sarah Schmidt breathes such life into the terrible, twisted tale of Lizzie Borden and her family, she makes it impossible to look away

• Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of THE LAST ACT OF LOVE

  What a book - powerful, visceral and disturbing. I felt like one of the many flies on the walls of that unhappy, blood-drenched house

• Hannah Beckerman

  An outstanding debut. Enviably brilliant and memorable

• Carys Bray

  Vivid, sultry and engrossing

• Kate Hamer author of THE GIRL IN THE RED COAT

  A twisty, visceral, highly original novel that grips you from start to finish. An exceptional and stunning debut

• Patrick Gale

  See What I Have Done held me in its sweaty grasp to the very last pages... as deftly destabilising as the best of Margaret Atwood

• Sam Baker

  The Pool

  I loved See What I Have Done. So ominous and creepily compelling. Utterly macabre, in a good way. It is a novel that is close in style and sensibility to Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

• Emma Flint author of LITTLE DEATHS

  See What I Have Done is wonderful. Exquisitely-drawn characters, beautiful prose, a brilliant retelling of story. Every single sentence is perfect

• Stacey Bartlett

  Fabulous Magazine

  I am obsessed with this book. It chews you up and spits you out like one of the ripe pears in Lizzie's garden. Incredibly tense and claustrophobic, Home Sweet Home is turned on its head for the nightmarish Borden family in this amazingly accomplished tale of power, betrayal and revenge

• Lady (Must-reads of 2017)

  [An] exquisitely crafted and chilling re-imagining of the gruesome 1982 crimes

• Heat

  Lizzie Borden and her axe have fascinated since 1892, and this incredible reimagining is one you'll never ever forget

• Stylist (Best books of 2017)

  A great historical novel that takes a real life crime as its starting point. See What I Have Done is a gripping family drama and a whodunnit about two unsolved murders... chilling and claustrophobic

• Observer

  Schmidt's portrayal of Lizzie is haunting and complex, a deeply psychological portrait that forces the reader to question their preconceptions about what women are capable of - for better and worse. Both disturbing and gripping, it is an outstanding debut novel about love, death and the lifelong repercussions of unresolved grief.

• Sunday Express

  Sarah Schmidt's reimagining of the fatal events in the Borden household is dignified and sensual, as though Henry James had decided to tell the tale

• Stylist

  [A] seminal voice of the future.... a dark, dense visceral ride that proves that this former librarian could be on course to become one of the breakout writers of the decade... Donna Tartt, make room

• Sunday Independent

  Schmidt is especially good at the sweltering claustrophobia in which the Bordens lived. She is also great at portraying the pent-up frustration of the spinster Borden sisters

• Guardian

  Schmidt's unusual combination of narrative suppression and splurge makes for a surprising, nastily effective debut

• Sunday Mirror

  Intense, unsettling and macabre

• Sunday Times

  She skilfully evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of the household, conjuring up the rottenness of the family's relationships

• Red Magazine

  A claustrophobic, absolutely visceral novel that, like the walls of that unhappy house, leaves a stain long after the final page

• Heat

  Breathlessly brilliant

• The Times

  A disquieting read... I loved it

• Metro

  This startlingly potent novel isn't so much a straightforward whodunit as a portrait of a dysfunctional household from which the emotionally arrested Lizzie emerges as the novel's most unsettling character

• Irish Times

  The narrative alternates between Lizzie, whose shimmering, mercurial streams of consciousness read like prose poetry... Schmidt writes with precision and flair about the oppressive boredom of domesticity, the twisted intensity of sisterly love and the forlorn dreams of leaving and of personal reinvention Emma and Lizzie share. A glittering, gory fever dream of a book, See What I Have Done is a remarkable debut.