PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Taut and affecting, Tides proceeds in fragments ... Just as the sea offers Mara scant sanctuary, Freeman’s unsparing prose leaves a cold sting ... If, at times, some metaphors are needlessly reiterated...the overall effect is quietly seductive. We are drawn frictionlessly into Mara’s psyche, and then made to stay there.
Claire Vaye Watkins
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness achieves many...things, and it does so viscerally and candidly. The tales of sex and drugs come thick and fast ... Such candour will not appeal to all readers, but it is central to this playful, serious novel concerned with female freedom. Watkins rightly refuses to see these \'details\' as surplus to a woman’s life and its telling. Her novel is not helped, however, by occasionally mystifying allusions to characters such as \'my biologist\' (whose identity is only explained nearly 200 pages in), while the reams of unmediated correspondence between Claire’s mother and her cousin go on for too long. Strongest, in this novel of fluid form, are those passages that transcend conventional anecdote.
Lina Meruane, tr. Megan McDowell
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Hypochondriacs may take anxious pleasure in the latest novel from Lina Meruane ... Nervous System is a work of disease in both senses of the term, interweaving interiority and toe-curling corporeality ... In its sensitivity to how bodies suffer, relate to and rely on each other, Nervous System has non-fictional counterparts in the work of Rebecca Solnit ... Despite such fine company, however, the narrative is weighed down by its fragments’ earnest jostling for profundity, and it is as burdened as it is buoyed by its clever guiding metaphors ... Nonetheless, there are moments of genuine poetry, capably captured by Megan McDowell’s translation.
William Gibson
PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Time play is second nature to Gibson but it can be tough to keep pace with Agency. As with Brexit—which, in Verity’s timeline, went Remain after all—tracking its febrile plot and crowded cast prompts flashes of comprehension chased by furrows of despair. This frustration would be eased if the characters felt worth fighting for. But the novel’s beings are often thinly fleshed, including the none-too-likeable Verity ... The novel’s finale is anticlimatic.
Joanna Kavenna
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... the novel unfolds in a searingly proximate future that is far more plausible than fantastical ... the subject that it explores most brilliantly of all is selfhood ... offers sharp observations on the silencing of the dissenting (often) female voice...This element works especially well because it sits subtly within the text. At other points, Zed can seem rather too crudely didactic, preferring to highlight its trickery, where implication would suffice. The system that Kavenna describes in vivid detail is also occasionally dizzying, with its acronyms and inventions. Nonetheless, few authors can so deftly cite Louis Althusser’s idea of interpellation or Martin Heidegger’s Dasein within a page-turning absurdist thriller. Zed sweats with wit and vitality, and reads like the work of a writer relishing her task. It also transcends its moment. For beyond its commentary on our present age – its technologies and pathologies – it can be interpreted as a cautionary tale about the havoc wrought on us by those who cannot accept that we will never be immortal, omniscient or transparent (to each other and ourselves).
