The God Child

Plot introduction

Inspiration

Reception

• The Times praising Sayer as "a subtle moralist with an eye for the stranger byways of vice and virtue" and declaring the novel as "fresh evidence for his talent and seriousness".
• Andy Beckett in The Independent wrote "Sayer's writing is spare and cool, slightly at odds with the melodrama it carries; at the end, his tone of seaside resignation, of lives stilled between the town's great sweep of beach and sky, begins to infect and slow the pace of events. Broome is questioned and accused, he in turn demands the truth from Maisie - yet all of these confrontations lack the back-and-forth decisiveness of a thriller climax, opting instead for friction and frustration, the stuff of Alan Bennett rather than Alistair MacLean. It doesn't quite work. Maisie and the dead man never become more than sketches. Broome's panics never boil into hysteria. Yet the eerie quiet that surrounds their final accommodation has its power."