RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Aw treats his characters with a fierce tenderness that suggests more than a touch of familiarity with the kinds of lives portrayed. The South is announced as the first in a quartet promising to explore one family’s story across turbulent times. It succeeds magnificently in its own right, however, as a moving portrait of how we all experience as extraordinary what we later learn was merely a first time.
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)If The Imagined Life’s queer politics is refreshingly non-identitarian...its narrator is bracingly candid about the messiness of his intimate life ... Andrew Porter is well known for his short stories, and his skills are once again on clear display in this debut novel—in its use of telling detail, its affective economy of repetition, its fruitful ambiguity. It is these elements, however, that become strained in the longer form. Yet The Imagined Life is compulsively readable, and it will surely find its way into many Santa Monica, Fire Island and Bondi summer book bags, whose owners can look forward to its vein of attenuated nostalgia and cautious hope.
Garth Greenwell
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)To the degree that Small Rain is another instalment in an unmaking and remaking of Garth Greenwell’s writerly self, it offers a welcome call to action – to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew.
