About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lauren Elkin
Rave The Spectator (UK) Lively and vibrant ... What this book does brilliantly: engage with the physicality of art, the sensory, texture, lumps and all. It juxtaposes artists and writers who insist on both beauty and excess ... Packed with theory, but is jargon-free. As well as critical, Elkin’s prose is chatty and at times enjoyably blunt ... Complex. Changeable. Out of bounds. Ambiguous, like the stroke. Monstrous art, Elkin writes, is weird and bold. ‘What makes it good – what sets it apart – is its commitment to a sometimes scathing honesty.’ You could say the same for this superb book.
Nicole Flattery
Positive Times Literary Supplement (UK) At once unrelenting...and endlessly absorbing – is less a feminist retelling and more a lens on what Mae eventually realizes is \'misery laid bare in the service of art\' ... This is an honest book about pretenders and the gap between who we are, what we say and how we appear. There are times when the theme is spread on a little thick...but perhaps that’s the point. From the start Mae senses this distance in herself and others, yet she plays along with the charade. Because it’s irresistible, this modern and free-spirited scene.
Kamila Shamsie
Rave The Spectator (UK) Gentle but insistent ... If you’re worried that a novel about the longevity of childhood friendship sounds sentimental, don’t be. Tangled up with Maryam and Zahra’s relationship are questions of responsibility, justice, power and ethics ... It’s the deep-rooted and complicated bond between the two women that keeps us turning the pages ... Alive and kicking beneath the surface. Simmering gently.
María Gainza, tr. Thomas Bunstead
Positive The Spectator (UK) It feels like the Argentine writer is having fun ... This is a clever novel that explores the gap between what’s remembered and what’s real, and poses questions about the nature of originality and sincerity ... Of course, fiction itself is simulation, as Gainza’s painterly prose reminds us.
Jessie Greengrass
Positive Times Literary Supplement (UK) Absorbing ... Among other things, this is a story of self-preservation, and the way we cling to the everyday in the face of uncertainty ... The narrative skips back and forth in time, propelled throughout by an urgent sense of unease. As it unfolds, it becomes more fragmented, the three first-person voices melding into one another like the seasons ... The premiss is dark, but Greengrass’s lyrical prose brings glimmers of light .
Clare Sestanovich
Rave The Times Literary Supplement (UK) ... pithy ... Sestanovich beautifully balances light and dark, humour and melancholy. She excells at dialogue, the tone droll ... Though dealing with messy subjects – misogyny, open marriages, authenticity, fame – Sestanovich’s prose remains poised. Her storytelling is clean and polished, underscoring the fine line between how we wish to be seen and how we appear. As these characters quietly unravel, yearning rubs up against misery.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Rave The Spectator (UK) ... slim and bewitching ... might be called a quiet book, but it isn’t without bite ... Lahiri has spun a delicately layered story of a woman reflecting on her past, present and future. It lends itself to being read in a single sitting, during which time you’ll feel your own life standing still, suspended. The author has a talent for capturing the everyday, a talent the narrator acknowledges when she and her friend’s husband go their separate ways after a chance encounter: ‘Then we, too, become two shadows projected on to the wall: a routine spectacle, impossible to capture.’ Impossible for some, perhaps, but not for Jhumpa Lahiri.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, trans. by Michele Hutchison
Rave The Times Literary Supplement (UK) As the title warns us, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The way grief relentlessly nibbles away at a family. The emotional and physical torment inflicted on and by children. At times it’s hard to read, and yet, this debut novel, which first appeared in Dutch in 2018, is also beautifully tender and consistently compelling ... Rijneveld, who grew up in a Reformed farming family, is a poet as well as a novelist, whose sensuous prose is filled with intoxicating imagery. Warts on a toad’s back resemble capers, while a vet’s black curls dangle like party streamers around his cheeks ... Michelle Hutchison’s translation is lucid throughout. If we weren’t seeing the world through Jas’s eyes, the mass of similes might start to grate. Instead, the images capture a child’s knack for disappearing into make-believe when things go wrong.