“Thornell brings her images to life on the page, and uses language in a way that is just as intriguing… For Thornell’s Clarice Beckett, it was only about art always, and Thornell has created a convincing portrayal of a woman so absorbed.”
– Pickle Me This

“In real life, the Australian Clarice Beckett was a tonalist painter famous for her misted landscapes. Thornell evokes this same ethereality but, unlike Beckett, she reveals her own marrow only in the briefest of glimpses.”
– Scene

“The novel manages to capture the paintings, and the life, of Beckett. Not much is actually known of Beckett, but portraying her life as a reflection of her paintings is inspired, especially as Thronell pulls it off.”
– An Adventure in Reading

“Thornell’s evocative, atmospheric language blends perfectly with her subject matter and is unquestionably what makes this novel such a unique read. The result is a portrait of Beckett that appropriates many of the techniques favoured by the painter, particularly, as Thornell acknowledges in the postscript to her novel, ‘squinting to soften edges and reach beyond detail in search for patterns of light and shade.’… Night Street is a beautifully crafted and compelling novel… Thornell not only enchants the reader with her well-balanced descriptions that resemble the very portraits and landscapes they describe, but also turns the reader onto a supremely talented yet tragically overlooked and undervalued painter, Claire Beckett.”
– The Bull Calf

“Thornell has crafted a world in which a woman artist negotiates the constraints of her era and her particular circumstances. In doing so, she has created word-canvases that depict the dark and the light of Clarice’s life. The novel is rich with patterns of light and shade.”
– Herizons

“In this original and sensual novel, Kristel Thornell immerses us in the painter’s experience and sees with her eyes. It’s uncanny! She seems to write in brush strokes.”
“Night Street is a sensual novel with painterly undertones, smokey and lovely. The intermingling of a woman’s art and her charged secret lives forms a rapturous alchemy, electric and haunting.”
“In language subtle and fluid as brush strokes, Night Street insinuates past the surface and seeks, like painting, the place where landscape and character is indivisible. Based on the life of Australian artist Clarice Beckett, the writing is flecked with arresting insights, ridged with life’s exigencies. This is a touching, unusual, beautiful book.”