As Clara strives to fulfil her vocation as a writer, and as she struggles in later years with the cumulative constraints of an unhappy marriage, her imagination is strangely haunted by a life that might have been.
Tracing Clara’s story from her adolescence to her experience of motherhood, and then through to a pivotal bid for freedom, Two Hours is an exceptional novel. Witty, perceptive, and profoundly humane, this is the work of a writer at the height of her powers.
Navigating the extreme gap between a woman’s life and the one she imagined for herself, the writer’s third novel is concise, rigorous and heartbreaking
full reviewJohn Self - the Observer
A literary masterpiece of grace and weight. Two Hours sets Arikha apart from her contemporaries as an author with a particular and poignant vision.
full reviewHelen Cullen - The Irish Times
Pellucid and precise, a wonderful wry lesson in forging a life without regret. Arikha, whose life bears many biographical details with her narrator, and whose 2017 memoir Major/Minor, was highly praised, isn’t very well known in this country. Really, she ought to be.
full reviewClaire Allfree - The Independent
Alba Arikha's novel Two Hours left a great impressions on me. Told in diaristic and poetic first-person, the novel is charged with a sense of alternative.
full reviewRebecca Watson, assistant arts and books editor - The Financial Times
Arikha inhabits Clara with such emotional authenticity, that when she makes her final bid for freedom you’ll want to hold her hand and run.
full reviewSally Morris - Daily Mail
It is a story relayed with uncommon punctuation, often in paragraphs so slight they resemble verses It is inhabited by associations to words with the prefix ‘in/im’: impulse; initiation; infiltration; intensity. This is truly the only book that I have returned from the last page back to the first, to read all over again.
full reviewAmanda Hopkinson - The Jewish Chronicle
This is a book about the strained “almosts” in life. Alba Arikha successfully captures the violent tension of being at the threshold of adulthood and yearning for a freedom that is just out of reach.
full reviewOonagh Devitt Tremblay - TLS
Alba Arikha takes us magically into the very heart of a woman’s experiences—her loves, her art, her fears, and that brief, ecstatic moment that has watermarked her entire life.
Edmund White
Arikha’s Major/Minor is in my view a small masterpiece, and with Two Hours I believe she is making something of similar stature.
Rachel Cusk
Wonderfully precise, absolutely enthralling and revelatory, Two Hours is an X ray of the emotional life.
Simon Callow, actor and writer
Out of a seemingly casual array of swift vignettes, fleeting encounters, cityscapes caught on the fly, and sudden, bright shocks of emotion, Alba Arikha has constructed a radiant story of loss and love, entrapment and freedom, and the strange patterns of fate and desire that shape our lives. Every piece of her mosaic shimmers with acute observation, and the whole comes together to form a powerfully singular account of the universal struggle to live a life of integrity and meaning. It is a rare and fine accomplishment.
James Lasdun
I loved Alba Arikha's Two Hours. Clear and sharp, written with an engraver's burin.
Adam Foulds
On plonge dans le bain brûlant de la vie amoureuse d'une femme, depuis son premier coup de foudre, jusqu'à son mariage, sans jamais lâcher des mains ce livre où chaque lectrice peut se dire: 'c'est exactement comme cela que j'ai vécu, aimé, souffert ...'
Anne Berest - author of La carte postale
Fascinating. The prose is wonderful, and the way that she writes about relationships is really moving
full reviewAshley Parker, Morning Meeting - Air Mail podcast
An intricate portrait of a woman's life captured in fleeting bursts of memory. In a series of artfully woven moments, Arikha tells a story that lingers beyond the margins and will linger with the reader long after its conclusion.
full review
Lydia Waites - The Lincoln Review
A must read: gripping, painful and full of humanity and charm - I truly loved it.
Gerry Fox, filmmaker and artist
A beautiful book. So haunting and alive, a real achievement.
George Prochnik - author of The impossible exile: Stefan Zweig at the end of the world
A beautifully written, lyrical and unflinching account of a woman’s life, from teenage love to maturity and motherhood.
Vesna Goldsworthy
What we're reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed
full reviewAlba Arikha
