PanThe Observer (UK)The glorious mystery of the artistic process is not the main focus and the tabloid-style art world revelations have been made so many times they’re as scintillating as flat champagne ... It’s all a bit tawdry. It has the effect of making the art world, once so exciting, seem dilettantish and passé.
PanThe Observer (UK)The novel is sparely narrated by these main characters in turn – Kai from beyond the grave – but all three are equally resentful, guilty and miserable. I did appreciate the story’s normalisation of racial, sexual and cultural variety, its celebration of friendship and some barbed comments about gentrification in Houston ... For the most part, though, Family Meal feels like a wan echo of Washington’s debut, with its dead parents, mixed east Asian and Black heritage and diverse minor characters, the motif of food as an emotional expression, and its unconventional domestic setups and constant touchiness ... A low-energy love triangle ... Serves up too little for too long.
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
RaveThe Observer (UK)Fantastic ... Siddiqi’s easy storytelling and her heroine Anisa’s sweet narrative voice slip down like summer rosé. Siddiqi...has the gift of maintaining propulsion and mystery, while keeping things human and realistic, and it’s lovely to see the world through the eyes of an intelligent, sensitive and sincere protagonist.
Katy Hessel
RaveThe Observer (UK)[A] positive, beautifully written corrective, which should become a founding text in the history of art by women ... Brings centuries-old figures to life while giving form and gravitas to emergent voices and covering every substantial movement from dadaism to civil-rights-era antiracist art along the way ... It is thick with fascinating details, so that even readers who pride themselves on being exhibition hounds, art historians and gallery hoppers will discover new names ... Hessel balances her research with an easy, intimate approach to each artist’s work, combining a sense of their historical significance with an extraordinary ability to encapsulate their unique style ... Inspiring and indispensable.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
PanThe Observer (UK)\"The novel is a crushingly painful, loaded and on-the-nose commentary on racism, exploitation, inequality and the legacy and loud echoes of slavery in the US ... Unfortunately, the richness of the conceit makes it tiresome to read ... Even though the ideas are big and bold, the novel is a slog. In its characters’ endless cycle of violence, misery, trauma and rumination, all light and shade is lost. There is action in spades, but little real plot; dialogue, but little psychological nuance. We are told many of the condemned characters’ tragic backstories, often in poignantly throwaway footnotes....we do not feel them or feel for them. The main characters glower like video game characters and talk like CGI bounty hunters. Adjei-Brenyah is clearly a writer of substance, with something to say. As we anticipate later novels by him, maybe skip this one and wait instead for pop culture to eat itself, shed all irony and churn out the inevitable Netflix adaptation.\
Tsitsi Dangarembga
RaveThe Observer (UK)Short, serious and powerful ... A celebration of artistic creation at the same time as an acknowledgment of unjust worldly realities. She has a talent for taking activist buzzwords, around women’s agency or the importance of decolonising the canon, and examining how powerful yet difficult it is to pull up the deep structural and psychological roots of patriarchy and empire.
Celeste Ng
RaveThe Observer (UK)... a feat of meaty storytelling wrapped around a stark warning about the present day’s racial divisions, political conflicts and inequality ... manages to wrench adventure, heroism and bravery from a painful set-up ... Throughout, the writing is quick and poised ... Ng effortlessly combines a character-led family story with a detective tale, a tribute to books and storytelling and a confrontation with history. Her portrait of Noah’s mother, Margaret Miu, enables her to have some fun with standard arts festival panel questions ... While Pact and the crisis may be inventions, it would be wrong to call the novel prophetic or futuristic. All the elements of the novel’s setting are already here, readable in the headlines every morning ... The America of Our Missing Hearts is already with us. From these dark roots, Celeste Ng crafts a story that is exceptionally powerful and scaldingly relevant.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Fajardo-Anstine describes Denver with a pleasing solidity, its shops, bars and carnivals and small bands of enemies and allies carrying a detailed everyday heft. She offers a fascinatingly rich setting that depicts American western self-mythologisation in the making ... The prose weakens when reaching for a certain classic register. There are unnecessary Reader’s Digest novel-like chapter headings ... There is no need for such try-hard phrases, as the raw stuff of Fajardo-Anstine’s world is so fascinating. When it isn’t straining for similes and metaphors, the writing becomes easy and muscular ... Fajardo-Anstine is brilliant at evoking the everyday resilience of people carrying centuries of history in their souls in a charged present day that offers advancement and change alongside violence and insult ... achieves something very satisfying as a soapy, immersive saga – a feat of old-school storytelling.
