About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
József Debreczeni
Rave The Times (UK) \"Debreczeni chronicles the steady, relentless, carefully planned dehumanization of the prisoners and everyday life inside the camps in powerful, stomach-churning detail ... Debreczeni sharply dissects the hierarchies that emerge. His careful observations about the hated kapos, privileged inmates, bring fresh understanding of the power dynamics in a world of profound dehumanization ... it was largely forgotten for years, until Debreczeni’s nephew recently arranged for it to be translated. He chose well. Paul Olchváry, an award-winning and highly accomplished translator of Hungarian literature, has rendered Debreczeni’s prose into a literary diamond — sharp-edged and crystal clear. Like the works of Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, this is a haunting chronicle of rare, unsettling power.\
Paul Vidich
Rave The Financial Times (UK) The fateful night of November 9, as the crowds surge towards the border, is vividly drawn. Vidich skilfully weaves Anne’s story — and her growing strength — into the wider political backdrop, ramping up the tension in a complex, engrossing tale.
Stephen King
Rave Financial Times (UK) \"This engaging, multi-layered tale is a genre-bending mix of crime novel, war memoir and touching love story by a master storyteller. What’s never in doubt is King’s command of the arena where it unfolds: small-town America ... This unforgiving world, from the barren streets now laid waste by industries outsourced to China to the decency of most of its inhabitants, is portrayed in sharp detail ... The account of the battle for Falluja...is visceral and enthralling ... Alice does not appear until page 205 but then the story takes off. The real strength of the tale is their relationship. Alice is no passive victim and King gives her plenty of agency. \
John Le Carre
Mixed The Financial Times (UK) The cat sat on the mat is not a story,\' as John le Carré has opined, \'but ‘the cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is.\' A neater summary of the writer’s craft would be hard to find — but for too much of his latest novel, le Carré ignores his own advice. This cat sits too long on its own mat ... Agent Running in the Field is in part an undisguised Remainer screed, an anguished howl of Hampstead (where le Carré has a house) angst and fury ... The pacing is slow at first. But when the cat does eventually get off its mat, after 100 pages or so, it picks up rapidly. The tradecraft of espionage, the organisation of an operation and surveillance scenes are all finely drawn and precisely engineered ... When he is on form, le Carré still delivers cracking prose ... Just when the story picks up, Ed and Florence have galloped off in another, somewhat unconvincing, direction, as though le Carré was not quite sure what to do with his cast of characters. The ending, while heart-warming, is almost whimsical. Le Carré is rightly acclaimed as one of our finest novelists ... But in the canon of a great writer, Agent Running in the Field is a minor work.
Eric Dezenhall and Gus Russo
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The fact that neither [writer] is a historian brings a certain freshness to their narrative. Fast-paced and lively, Best of Enemies is suitable for the general reader with an interest in Cold War espionage, although its chatty tone and the authors’ evident admiration for their subjects can become tiresome ... Best of Enemies can be read as a lament for a world in which mutually assured destruction brought a strange kind of stability ... That world is long gone, leaving in its wake something much more perilous.
Lawrence Osborne
Positive The Financial Times Osborne does a fine job in giving Marlowe a fresh assignment in this evocative, melancholy homage ... The first part of Only to Sleep is a little slow paced. Osborne sometimes overplays Marlowe’s decrepitude, as he dodders around with his cane, his knees wobbly, his joints aching, his restless nights filled with the faces of long-dead cases, most of whom met a violent end. Yet when Marlowe has to fight for his life, he still remembers his moves ... Only to Sleep is more than a detective story. It is also a meditation on aging and how, even in the autumn of a man’s life, he still is driven to pit his skills and courage against dangerous adversaries.
Megan Abbott
Rave Financial Times Give Me Your Hand is a finely crafted story of obsession ... Give Me Your Hand, Megan Abbott’s ninth novel, is more than a gripping story. The writing is of a quality not often seen in commercial fiction, full of evocative phrases that transform the everyday to the poetic ... Her prose has the vividness of cinema ... Abbott gives a powerful sense of the lab atmosphere ... Kit and Diane are richly drawn, complex characters ... For all Abbott’s skill at storytelling and layered characterisation, it’s no spoiler to say...Diane’s secret is well flagged and turns out to be rather obvious. So, in the middle of the story, when the narrative starts to lag, Abbott drops in a shocking, unexpected event to further heighten the stakes.
Philip Kerr
Positive The Financial Times At just over 500 pages, the book is too long—the earlier scenes set in Munich could be cut back. But Kerr skilfully weaves his detailed research into the narrative without sounding didactic or heavy-handed. Like its companion novels, the book is fast-paced, with vivid, sympathetic characters and evocative scenes. Athens in the 1950s is a city of intrigue, political instability and endemic corruption, where everyone, especially Gunther’s local fixer, has a network of cousins to open doors ... Kerr’s untimely death marks the loss not just of a great novelist but a memorable protagonist, whose wisecracking façade conceals a detective on a much deeper quest: how should a man live, especially when his soul is corroded by history, his own most of all.