Deborah Saville
I read this book in my teens, my mum gave it to me. On reflection not sure if she knew what the story was about! Or maybe she was trying to say watch out this what happens when you stray. I read this book again and again. It was a book that gave me hope when I was coping with profound emotional difficulties in my own life

Liz G
I read this book in the mid sixties alomg with its companions. It spurred me on to leave village life and have courage to embark on a career in the big city. Truly a watershed for me.

Gillon
I'm Lynne Reid Bank's middle son, so, um, forgive me for adding my ten cents. My mother wrote the L-Shaped Room when she was a television journalist. The story goes that while her workmates were out eating lunch every day, she - much to their amusement - remained glued to her desk tap-tap-tapping out her new novel. She was only twenty-nine at the time, a fact that impresses me more every year that passes since I turned the same age - which is seven, at the last count. Congrats, mum, on being nominated. You showed your family, and families all over the world how ten fingers and thirty keys can change the way we think and feel forever. Oh - Mum also wrote a book about the Bronte Sisters - funny how one of them is back to battle it out for first place -- seems a little ungrateful to me.

Doreen Thomas
I read this book as a teenager and it was a better preparation for 'real' life than anything my mother told me!

Patricia Roper
I was 17 when I read it and quite naive and when I left home a year later I thought I too can survive in this male dominated world.The year was 1968.

Vanessa Barber-Miller
Our English and Drama teacher chose this for our class to read in our third year of comprehensive school. It was like nothing I had read before. The rest of our year were reading Shakespeare and I remember feeling rather grown-up being trusted with this book about sex, abortions and the struggle of a young woman bringing up her baby alone in a Fulham bedsit. It was both an eye-opening and empowering experience.

F Thraille
I was adopted in the early 1970s and reading this gave me a real insight into the attitudes of the time. Personally, it helped me to sympathise with the mother I never knew and to comprehend the very real dilemmas that faced single mothers before they became slightly less stigmatised.

Lesley Fildes
I remember reading this book so many times and realising how important it is to take control of whatever we find ourselves engulfed by and not to wallow!

Sharon Ebbs
I was at a friend's house for the weekend and looked on the shelves for a book to read. I found this one. I loved it and was so fed up when it finished. What a wonderful discovery to find out later that it was the first part of a trilogy - I devoured them all. If only we could convince non-reders of how much they are missing...

Sophie Massey
I first read this book as a teenager - in fact it was probably one of the first adult books I chose to read myself. Although the issues in the novel were more controversial in the 60s than when I read it, this was the first time I had thought seriously about what it means to be a woman, to have control over one's body and destiny. The emotional life of the protagonist is sensitively portrayed and, again, this was the first novel I read where I sensed the acute conflict in many young women between the desire for partnership with a man and the desire for independence. The L-Shaped Room was recently serialised on Radio 4 and after hearing it, I re-read the book. I was as absorbing as the first time, and, now that I am a mother myself, a whole new raft of women's issues raised in the book struck a chord with me. An excellent novel for women of all ages.

Lesley Spence
The L Shaped Room, The Backward Shadow and Two is Lonely are a superb trilogy.

Ann R
I saw the film of this book as a teenager; I think I had to watch it secretly! I read the book in my earyl twenties when having read the fly-jacket description of the story in a bookshop, I recognised it. I was particularly motivated because the main character in the film was French & I was studying Languages at University; this involved spending a year abroad, which was a scary & lonely experience at times! I loved every word of the novel & have never forgotten the powerful effect it had upon me. I'm pretty sure that I read the whole trilogy one after the other. It was a novel that spurred me on to reading a succession of "real-life" stories in fiction, such as "A Kind of Loving", "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning" & "A Taste of Honey".

Judy Stephenson
I read this when in a similar situation to the heroine- it did make me feel less alone.

Anne Vetch
i just loved this book and reread it regularly

Suki Fane
I read the three books 25 years ago and they completely consumed me. I haven't read them again, and I don't want to. At that time I WAS Jane. Even now, 25 years and many house moves later, I can put my hand on those books in an instant.

Olive Huston
I read this book when it was first written and found it very moving, well written and with interesting well drawn characters.The trilogy remained among my favourites. A few years ago I was tutoring a group of adult learners for GCSE English, some of whom, to my dismay, had never read a novel in their lives. To introduce them to reading I suggested this book but wondered if the fifties theme would be dated. However, several of the group turned out to be single mothers who were pleased to discuss their own experiences, amazingly, in the nineties, not so far removed from those of Jane. All the students related to events in this novel, some were inspired to read further and move on to classic novels but several used it along with The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, to write on the theme of single parenthood for their course work. A successful experiment!

Bonny Landsborough
This was one of the first adult books I read. It was such a relief to read a book about real lives, and real people. For me it was about independent living and being her own woman. Wonderful characters and beautifully written.

Sue Lacey-Hatton
I could not put the book down: i read it feeding the baby, as i did the ironing. I just walked round reading it, and could think of nothing else. When i had finished it , it haunted me for days, and it still does. I believe her relationship with Toby(?) was probably mirrored by my own unhappy marriage at the time.

Kirsti
I really loved this book, it is so so good. Are the sequals worth reading or would it spoil it?

Anna B
I loved this trilogy of books. I read The L Shaped Room in my first year of university. I was a fresh faced country bumpkin and i sought solace in these books and they helped me gain confidence to go out and experience the world. I could read these books over and over again!

Kim
Of all the books on your long-list (of which I have read the majority) I recall this book as having had a very profound effect on me when I first read it, twenty years ago. Her personal dilema and circumstances were so different to my own life that it really made me think about how other women might have very different life expriences to my own. I then went on to read the whole trilogy(?) and I realsied whilst reading the the last book in the series how strongly I had come to identify with the main xter - living contently in a cottage with a child and good friends. My life hasn't unfolded in this way but it created such a strong empathetic reaction in me that I still believe that this is my destiny even though I am now in my forties.

Rachel Sullivan
brilliant. I come back to this again and again