RaveThe Spectator (UK)Always witty and unexpected...she has a clear perception of the passion, pain and particularities of female existence ... The novel’s ending is unexpectedly positive. Who would have thought that a story about drug addiction and self-destruction would leave its reader feeling optimistic?
Richard Flanagan
MixedThe Spectator (UK)Written with Flanagan’s characteristic mix of humanism and emotional insight, this uneven novel could have been powerful and moving. Its artistic problem is that layered into it is Anna’s conviction that she herself is vanishing, losing first a finger, then a knee in an extended metaphor that, true to the tropes of magic realism, drives inexorably towards parrots: specifically, orange-bellied ones that are disappearing in Tasmania, thanks to the destruction of their habitat. Anna waits for people to notice that she is disappearing. They don’t, although it is a condition that is catching: her son Gus, obsessed by gaming, vanishes to the extent that only a pair of thumbs pressing buttons on his console are left, raising a rare smile in those of us familiar with this problem too ... Flanagan’s gift is not, however, for Kafkaesque fantasy; what could have made two very different novellas is mashed into one 282-page novel.
Hannah Rothschild
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Rothschild takes us once again to a sphere of vulgar greed and tasteful snobbery ... The dialogue and plot move at a cracking pace, and the sympathetically drawn characters are oven-ready for a TV series ... Fun of this kind is irresistible, even if its mildly satirical portrait of unearned privilege also palls. The problems real families in Cornwall face go far beyond the scope of this novel, but Rothschild’s tale is a lively and entertaining addition to its literature of escapism.
Philip Pullman
RaveThe Spectator (UK)Part of Pullman’s striking originality lies in his conception of a world like and unlike our own, in which human souls are visible as animals ... returns us to the energetic inventiveness of a master-storyteller expanding his creation ... violently enjoyable and enjoyably violent, but is also suffused with wonder, beauty, delicacy, perceptiveness, kindness, decency and romance. The writing is as exquisite as it is compelling. This is, in short, exactly the kind of novel that you give up hoping for when leaving behind the world of children’s literature for that of the adult.
