RaveThe Guardian (UK)Meticulously piecing together the debates that fired Dostoevsky’s imagination, The Sinner and the Saint is filled with arresting details that bring the turbulence of the 1860s to life ... Birmingham traces the evolution of Crime and Punishment through Dostoevsky’s notebooks, offering a thrilling glimpse of the creative faculties at work as he tweaks dialogue, defers the resolution of Raskolnikov’s motivations, and adds in unexpected twists. As we approach the end of The Sinner and the Saint, and Raskolnikov begins to live and breathe in all his complexity, Lacenaire begins to seem less and less interesting by comparison ... The Sinner and the Saint is not just a fitting tribute to one of the great works of world literature, but a dazzling literary detective story in its own right.
Chris Power
RaveThe White ReviewPower writes arrestingly, particularly about nature... simultaneously poetic and precise, with its wonderful rolling rhythm bearing the computational language of division, shifting, fractions. Mothers is also brilliantly controlled (for any collection of stories, let alone a first collection) ... takes a theme too complex to approach except obliquely – the conflict between love and freedom – and, like a particle accelerator, repeatedly fires ideas at it to see what can be inferred from the collision. Power writes mothers, but also daughters, sons, lovers, families and bickering couples, testing different ages, sexualities, genders and cultures to create a composite which arrives at more than the sum of its parts – not a clutch of episodes, but a single, unified, many-sided work, best read cover to cover.
