Reviews of Dying Young

“It was so beautifully written and encompassed so many things that there was no way I could consider not doing it.”
Julia Roberts, Actress (as reported to Jeremy Austin)

“Dying Young is an extraordinary accomplishment…Leimbach has produced in Dying Young a masterpiece of details that always rings true, with the sad, funny and fascinating unpredictability of real life.”
People Magazine

“Rarely have love and death been so movingly annotated as in this clever, quirky book.”
Penny Perrick, Sunday Times

“Leimbach writes with a shrewd, dry-eyed, perceptively acquisitive energy…A promising talent and a bravura approach to a romantic tale of considerable popular appeal.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Leimbach is concerned with large matters such as the nature of relationships and love, violence, sex, death, suicide, fidelity and privilege and explores them skilfully.”
Literary Review

"How she manages this affair while remaining fiercely loving and loyal to Victor is the gist of this touching, well-wrought story. The 25-year-old Leimbach offers some remarkably astute perceptions on death's power to confound our expectations and love's power to confound death as she moves toward an ending that is both satisfying and unexpected."
9/15/89 -Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Beautifully detailed…a genuine voice.”
Woman

“A searing novel because it eschews the pull of sentimentality for the busyness of ‘real life’…There is as much smashing of glass and slamming of doors as there is mopping of brows and plumping up of pillows…her characters honour their instincts at any cost.”
The Times

“A simply told tragic love story…She is intimate with us about he most banal aspects of these peoples’ lives, yet the weighted emotion of the story is delivered lightly: a balancing act, which Leimbach usually pulls off.”
The Times Literary Supplement

“Leimbach shows a stern maturity, and a knowledge beyond her years of the fragile relations between love and death…Ultimately the novel belongs to Victor, an immensely lovable, utterly impossible man who least of anyone deserves an untimely death…a strange, unsettling book.”
Sunday Independent

“Marti Leimbach’s sparkling debut explores the emotional permutations of this triangle with warmth, off-beat humour and truly heart-rending poignancy.”
Cosmopolitan

“In her first novel Marti Leimbach sets out to explore mortality, sexuality and the nature of love…she has succeeded in a remarkable way…an impressive debut…convincing and ultimately moving.”
New Statesman & Society