common characters and themes, thus constituting a novel sequence. Craig has been cited as a state-of-the-nation novelist by Sameer Rahim in Prospect and by The Sunday Times. Usually, Craig takes a minor character and makes him or her the protagonist of her next work. She has been praised by A.N. Wilson as "the greatest novelist under fifty", and Allison Pearson in The Sunday Telegraph said: "She has everything you look for in a major writer: wit, indignation, an ear for the telling phrase and an unflagging attention to all the individual choices by which we define ourselves – where we stand as a society and how we decline and fall." Craig's fourth novel, In a Dark Wood, concerned the interplay between fairytales and manic depression, and her fifth, Love in Idleness, updates Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, setting the story in a holiday villa near Cortona, Italy. Her sixth novel, Hearts and Minds, concerned with the lives of legal and illegal immigrants in London, was longlisted for the 2009 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Her seventh novel, The Lie of the Land (2017), concerned with a London professional couple who can't afford to divorce and move to Devon to a rented house which has been the scene of a murder, was cited as "in the vanguard of the Brexit novel" by Danuta Kean in The Guardian. It was praised by Henry Hitchings in the Financial Times, who commented: "It seems strange that none of Craig's books have been adapted for TV, and the medium is one to which The Lie of the Land would be well suited. An enjoyable, sharp-witted and at times knowingly melodramatic novel, it lives up to the promise of its title – diagnosing the state of the nation without becoming grandiose, and debunking a few quaint myths about the patterns and textures of rural life." It was BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in August 2017. The Guardian chose it as one of the 2017 Books of the Year, as did The Irish Times, The Financial Times, The Observer, and The Telegraph. Craig has set two of her novels, A Private Place and The Lie of the Land, in Devon, a county that she has compared to C. S. Lewis's Narnia. In an interview with Jackie McGlone of The Glasgow Herald, Craig described how encountering the poverty of North Devon shocked her. Her eighth novel, The