RaveThe New Statesman (UK)What his characters feel in silence, Colm Tóibín tends to render exquisitely plain though never simple ... There’s great power coiled into these held-back responses to the world. Now in his seventies, Tóibín is getting sparer, more crystalline, losing everything that might have the faintest whiff of sentimentality.
Yiyun Li
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMysterious, but it bears its mystery lightly, with Li’s understated style touching on large ideas ... The novel could be read as a reflection on the impossibility of the writer’s art—that continued resistance, always falling short, to the given categories of real and unreal. But it is also a comment on how easily the writer’s fabrications are familiarized, exploited, and misunderstood.
Te-Ping Chen
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... acutely observed stories ... [Chen] knows her protagonists as people even as she is able to render their stories into parables about the country ... The Cultural Revolution has, of course, been a staple of Chinese literature...What makes it particularly poignant here is the reader’s realization that the generation involved directly in the affairs of that era is passing on and its legacy — often unacknowledged as this story shows — now increasingly belongs to those who were children then ... Chen’s stories abound in such telling images — the extraordinarily high human costs of creating the new China, so reminiscent of those that have been paid before.
