Darkness at Noon was very successful, selling half a million copies in France alone.[31] Kingsley Martin described the novel as "one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it".[32] The New York Times described Darkness at Noon as "a splendid novel, an effective explanation of the riddle of the Moscow treason trials...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling and with such persuasive simplicity that it is absorbing as melodrama".[32]
George Steiner said it was one of the few books that may have "changed history", while George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the New Statesman in 1941, stated:
Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.[33]
