Margaret Drabble's "The Needle's Eye" is an extraordinary work: It not only tells a story deftly, beautifully, with a management of past and present (and future) action that demonstrates Miss Drabble's total mastery of the mysterious form of the novel, but it succeeds in so re-creating the experiences of her characters that we soon forget they are fictional beings (perhaps they are not... ?) and we become them, we are transformed into them, so that by the end of the novel we have lived, through them, a very real, human and yet extraordinary experience. - Joyce Carol Oates An extraordinary work: it tells a story deftly, beautifully - Joyce Carol Oates