RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Robust, insistent prose ... Kennedy’s voice, and her unforgiving gaze, are electric ... Many moving moments in a collection that consistently captivates the reader.
Deirdre Mask
PositiveThe Times (UK)Addresses might seem a prosaic subject to write a book about. But read Deirdre Mask’s fascinating deep dive into the world of Mill Lane and Martin Luther King Street and you will begin to realise just how important these geographical markers are, how pregnant with meaning, and what a difference they make to everything from the proper functioning of society to questions of wealth, poverty and democracy ... [an] intelligent but thoroughly accessible survey ... These historical insights are all highly entertaining, and Mask is intriguing, for instance, on the early postal service...It is when Mask looks at the geopolitical significance of street names, though, that her book really comes into its own.
Jeanine Cummins
MixedThe Times (UK)...the book’s very ambitions, to document the migrant experience, ultimately work against it ... the novel is compelling and eye-opening. Short sentences, driving narrative ... For all her desire to flesh out her subjects’ stories, Cummins cannot give her characters depth. They remain resolutely two-dimensional ... All this means that when Cummins does, belatedly and in a rush, return to the thriller premise to tie up loose ends, the air has long since gone out of the novel, leaving the reader informed, yes, but also deflated.
Helen Garner
RaveThe Times (UK)Helen Garner’s This House of Grief....is as involving, heart-rending and unsettling a read as you could possibly find, a true-life account of three deaths and a trial that leaves you with a profound sense of unease as its drama unfolds, and disturbing questions about how we judge guilt and innocence ... Garner is an immensely sympathetic narrator, open, honest, swayed first one way and then the other by the competing claims of the barristers ... She is our unsteady moral compass in this storm of provisional truths, testing the opinions of onlookers, trying to be rational, watching the tears stream down the faces of accusers and accused alike ... Garner writes simply about the proceedings, but with immense control and many taut, haunting asides. Under her scrutiny, the plain, unglamorous cast in the courtroom begins to take on the heft of Homeric figures ... Some may come away from This House of Grief...unsatisfied by a book that ends, almost too abruptly, as soon as the final verdict is handed down. But the deep unease with which one is left, and the feelings of guilt and shame one shares with Garner about taking pleasure from such private grief, are the real legacies of this remarkable book.
Casey Cep
PositiveThe Times... fascinating ... Cep has spliced together a Southern-gothic tale of multiple murder with the unhappy story of Lee’s literary career, to produce a tale that is engrossing in its detail and deeply poignant ... Cep writes with great skill, sensitivity and attention to detail. The book does, however, suffer from three substantial problems, two of them, admittedly, not of Cep’s making. One is the frustrating secrecy that still surrounds Lee, which means most papers about her remain under lock and key. There is, too, the dying fall of Lee’s own life, which leads to the book ending on a frustratingly low-key note ... The third fault, however, is Cep’s own, and has to do with the structure of the book, as we are introduced first to Maxwell, then Radney (someone who should probably have taken a narrative back seat) and finally, more than halfway through the story, to Lee herself, each time being taken back to what feels like the beginning. That this doesn’t fatally upend the whole project has much to do with Cep’s other skills as a narrator, and the intense fascination of the subject she’s writing about.
Carys Davies
RaveThe Times (UK)\"...one of the most haunting and beautifully crafted novels I have read in a long time ... Some readers might find the premise of the novel (Bellman’s search for monsters) difficult to navigate, and just too quixotic. But, once you accept it, the novel blossoms. Davies, as she showed in her previous books, is immensely generous towards her characters — a gift of empathy that is hard to resist. She is comfortable, too, inhabiting different voices, and is subtle and rounded in her characterisation ... There is something of the fairy tale about Davies’s book. And like the best fairy tales, it is filled with wonder, about the natural world, and about humans and their impractical dreams. Davies has produced something quite wonderful in West. This is a gently seductive book, one that entrances right to its cleverly conceived end.\
