RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Paul Caruana Galizia is a superb storyteller. His book reads at times like a thriller, at times like a detective story, and at times like the work of an investigative journalist uncovering webs of corruption, with levels of detail that will be most interesting to those who understand Malta, its systems and flaws. His mother emerges as no saint either. She was clearly not the easiest of women to live with. Highly determined people rarely are ... This is Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy. Her son’s book is a moving testament to the life and work of an extraordinary woman and the country-changing power of journalism.
Ian Johnson
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)If [the subject] sounds in any way dry, this book will assure you that it’s not. Sparks is a work of scholarship, investigative journalism of a kind that rarely happens in the age of slashed budgets, with eyewitness accounts of brutality that will chill your blood ... Johnson’s stories, told by relatives of people who had suffered, bring these numbers, and this history, chillingly alive.
Hugh Bonneville
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Charmingly self-deprecating ... Acting may be full of rejection, waiting and humiliation, but what it clearly isn’t, at least in Bonneville’s hands, is dull ... This, it’s clear, is a professional memoir and the boundaries are firm ... And what a professional memoir ... Not gossipy ... Riveting.
Rob Percival
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)... thought-provoking ... this book is not another lecture on how we need to swap the sausage sarnies for tofu tempura...What Percival offers is much more interesting: an exploration of our psychological relationship with meat ... At times his book reads like a murder mystery as he digs deeper into the fraught relationship between humans and their prey ... a fascinating book, part cultural history of meat, part manifesto, part pilgrimage. Percival is a gifted writer, marshalling evidence, weaving together interviews and offering descriptions that at times verge on the poetic. Sometimes he seems to go a bit far. I wanted less mysticism and more practical advice. I also wanted a bit more hope, but this doesn’t appear to be on offer. This is the first book I have read that has talked about the climate emergency in a way that punched me in the stomach. It made me feel more squeamish about what I put into mine, but it also made me feel that tinkering with diets is really just fiddling while Rome burns.
Kathryn Schulz
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)... extraordinary ... It’s like taking a stroll with a highly erudite guide, but one with a piercing urgency in their voice. Lost & Found is both philosophical and profoundly personal, unflinching in its efforts to capture the whole truth about grief and loss, the banal and embarrassing as well as the drama: the sudden physical clumsiness, the unexplained toothache, the unexpected irritability. Schulz’s reflections and insights often feel like the articulation of something dimly glimpsed and rarely acknowledged, but they spring out of what is, essentially, the story of a family bound by deep bonds of love ... a profound and beautiful book. It’s a moving meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy, wonder and the miracle of love. It’s witty, wise, beautifully structured and written in clear, singing prose. Oh, and just wait till you hear what happened to that falling star.
Zoë Playdon
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)There are so many twists and turns in the tale that follows that it sometimes reads like a thriller ... [Playdon] is a skilful storyteller, and her descriptions of the Scottish landscape are so vivid I wanted to leap on a train and gaze at \'the falling sun\' making the shadows of beech trees \'a ladder of light\' ... What I didn’t find quite so convincing was the polemic ... certainly a point of view. And one of a number of deeply jarring notes in what could have been a terrific book.
Alex Von Tunzelmann
RaveThe Times (UK)Fallen Idols describes a stomach-turning litany of atrocities, but, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not an angry book. It’s a lively, engaging and often witty exploration of why statues are put up, why they are taken down and what this teaches us about history and memory. It’s extremely well researched. The notes stretch to more than 40 pages and von Tunzelmann credits a team of researchers. If it has an agenda, it’s one that urges us to see the layers, the nuance and the different points of view ... If you’re sick of the soundbites in the culture wars, sick of the shrieking and sick of finding yourself torn between binaries, this book will remind you that many of them are false.
Andrea Elliott
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)... from the first page we are gripped ... Elliott has won a string of awards for her work, including a Pulitzer, and it isn’t hard to see why. She’s a first-class storyteller and will have you reading with your heart in your mouth. Her characters are so vivid they leap off the pages. The prose fizzes. The dialogue crackles. The energy in the writing seems to match the energy of the characters, fighting, spitting, raging against the impossible odds. But they aren’t characters and this isn’t a story. These are real people and real lives...The text is nearly 600 pages. I still didn’t want it to end ... What shines through every page, and lifts this from reportage into something else, is that quality so key to the street: respect. Elliott is clear-eyed, meticulous and intensely aware of the shortcomings of the people she’s observing, and of parental behaviour that can certainly look like neglect. She is also aware of their courage and intelligence.
Mike Rothschild
RaveAirMailAn American journalist specializing in technology and conspiracy theories, Rothschild has been investigating QAnon since 2018 ... In clear, punchy prose Rothschild explains how the movement that started on a message board for white supremacists, antisemites and fans of hard-core porn moved into the mainstream, capturing the hearts of Instagram influencers as well as nearly 90 Republican candidates for the House of Representatives ... The Storm Is upon Us is an impressive piece of research and a gripping read. Unfortunately the storm is upon us, in the form of a vast online army that’s still here, and mad as hell.
Mike Rothschild
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)In clear, punchy prose Rothschild explains how the movement that started on a message board for white supremacists, antisemites and fans of hard-core porn moved into the mainstream ... The story of QAnon has so many twists and turns, it’s sometimes hard to keep track. But Rothschild’s book reads like a thriller, with cliffhangers that leave you eager for the next episode ... Rothschild writes with compassion about some of those who have been sucked into it ... What he doesn’t quite do is explain the psychological leap that enables perfectly ordinary people to believe that liberals and Jews are child-trafficking paedophiles. Perhaps no one really can ... The Storm Is Upon Us is an impressive piece of research and a gripping read.
Michael Lewis
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Lewis’s usual approach is to take a group of characters to flesh out a complicated theme and turn it into a gripping story. And he’s done it again here ... This is a book about some brave, curious people who tried hard to swim against the tide. As always in a Lewis book they are brought vividly alive. The descriptions are punchy, the dialogue snappy. Lewis is a master of his form. He’s an expert, in fact. It’s just a shame that the voices of the experts in his book were ignored until it was too late.
Katie Engelhart
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)... fascinating and deeply disturbing ... wide-ranging and meticulous research ... There’s a lot of \'narcissistic energy\' in this book...There’s also plenty of compassion, plenty of nuance and plenty of complex thought. Engelhart is a skilled storyteller. She marshals a mass of questions and arguments ... Engelhart doesn’t reach any firm conclusions. She’s clear that the laws on assisted dying are unequal to the task. She doesn’t say what laws she would pass, and I don’t blame her. Her brilliant book should be prescribed to all those who think they have a clear view.
Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O'Leary
PositiveThe Times (UK)It’s a tale of high drama and mesmerising detail, but also of breathtaking courage and compassion ... The cause is education, combating prejudice and hate, but most of all the cause is love. It’s the love Burks didn’t get from her family or husband. The love she lavishes on these men is deeply moving, and she gets some back. At a gay club she meets a community of drag queens who are like a family. The star of them all, Billy, is the one she loves most ... The ghost writer Kevin Carr O’Leary has taken Burks’s stories and turned them into a beautiful book, catching her Southern sass and charm. The epilogue makes it clear that Ruth Coker Burks has not had the recognition or happiness she deserves.
Caitlin Moran
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)In her descriptions of sex, as in so much else, Moran is fearless. Her honesty might make you gasp. It will certainly make you laugh out loud. But it will also make you think. Moran has thought deeply about what makes for good sex, what keeps a marriage alive, how to be a good parent and friend, and how to keep the whole exhausting show on the road without going mad, and almost every chapter is packed with insights that feel like revelations ... She’s brilliant on the physical stuff ... She’s also brilliant on the nuances of friendships, relationships and parenting ... And it’s heartbreaking. Moran writes with such warmth and searing honesty that she can yank you from laughter to tears on the same page ... This book is a hilarious memoir, a passionate polemic and a moving manifesto on how to be a decent person and try, in the face of countless stresses, to live a full, open-hearted, joyous life.
Francoise Frenkel
PositiveThe Times (UK)There’s a fair bit Frenkel doesn’t tell us in this extraordinary book ... has many echoes of Kafka, and is a reminder of the terrible truth he caught: that if you want to torture a human soul, you can do an awful lot with bits of paper ... Frenkel’s attempts to escape over the border to Switzerland, from December 1942, are as gripping as any thriller ... a stark and chilling account of what happens when a society turns rotten and the rot spreads. It is all the more shocking because the tone is so matter-of-fact. People spread hate as they eat their favourite snacks ... a strangely hypnotic demonstration of what the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt called the \'banality of evil\': a world where life and death are measured out in rubber stamps ... There’s a singing simplicity to the writing, but also the odd note that feels slightly stilted, with widespread use of phrases like \'not without\'. It’s hard to know if this is the translation or the original. There are also a lot of exclamation marks ... What we do know is that we owe [Frenkel] a huge debt of gratitude. In sharing her bitter taste of bitter history, she has shown us the worst of humanity — but also the best.
Kate Kirkpatrick
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)For much of the 20th century,\' says Kate Kirkpatrick in the introduction to this book, \'Beauvoir has not been remembered as a philosopher in her own right.\' Becoming Beauvoir is her attempt to set the record straight ...[Beauvoir\'s] student diaries weren’t published until 2008. Kirkpatrick has studied them all. Her \'select bibliography\' runs to eight pages and the footnotes to more than 50. Not a job for the faint-hearted, but she keeps her gaze steady, her eyes clear. Much of what she finds is pretty shocking ... It’s certainly a warts and all portrait, and Kirkpatrick doesn’t try to defend de Beauvoir when defence seems hard to rustle up ... Becoming Beauvoir is a book to be read slowly and savoured. There’s too much detail to gulp it down. But it is worth the time it takes to read a fascinating portrait of a woman who inspired women around the world and who changed the way many people think.
Chanel Miller
RaveThe Times (UK)Miller brings her story alive with so many compelling details that we feel every electric twitch and nuance of her tale ... At times, the tension is almost unbearable ... There are times when the campaigning voice in the book feels a little too loud...But she has told her story with such visceral power, and such quiet, deadly anger, that she doesn’t need to spell it out ... This is a minor flaw in a searing, beautiful book by a supremely talented writer. Know My Name? If you don’t now, you probably soon will.
Louise Erdrich
PositiveThe Independent (UK)...her most ambitious yet, bringing together a range of characters scattered throughout her fiction ... Throughout the narrative, and often on the same page, s/he is referred to by both names, not only underlining her dual identity, but also symbolising and dramatising the conflicts and ambiguities at the heart of the novel ... Erdrich\'s precise lyricism is rightly acclaimed, but she has an occasional tendency to overwrite and to launch into flights of surreal humour – suggesting a wry smile at the quirks of fate – that are weird to the point of jarring. Much more successful is her ability to encompass, in her encyclopaedic scope, a profound sense of the astonishing range of human yearning: the ways in which people and communities find the love, laughter and meanings they need to get through.
Miriam Toews
RaveThe Times (UK)The irony and wit, which is at times as casually lethal as a Dorothy Parker poem, just makes the novel’s central premise seem even more beyond the human capacity to bear ... This is a novel about bearing the unbearable ... In All My Puny Sorrows, as in her other novels, Toews writes in a cool, deceptively simple voice that moves seamlessly between the memory of past joy and the sometimes surprising banality of present pain. This often edges towards poetry ... If a novel works, it works. But her father killed himself in 1998 and her sister killed herself in 2010, and the novel she has written — so exquisitely that you’ll want to savour every word— reads as it if has been wrenched from her heart.
Lisa Taddeo
RaveThe Times (UK)...[an] extraordinary book ... In weaving these stories together, Taddeo paints an electrifying picture of female desire, and of the pain men casually inflict in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. She writes in searing prose that seems to capture every nuance. She doesn’t pull her punches. She calls a spade a spade and sexual intercourse a “f***”. In the context, it doesn’t seem obscene. She is aiming to capture the violence of sexual desire and its power to wreck lives — as well, of course, as create them. But there’s also a singing simplicity to the prose that at times lifts it to something more like poetry. At times there are biblical resonances to the prose. This seems entirely appropriate in work that is intended to capture the primal, scorching, life-changing power of sexual desire amid the banality of our daily lives. It doesn’t just aim. It succeeds. Three Women is an astonishing act of imaginative empathy and a gift to women around the world who feel their desires are ignored and their voices aren’t heard. This is a book that blazes, glitters and cuts to the heart of who we are. I’m not sure that a book can do much more.
Eve Ensler
MixedThe Times (UK)... at times so electrically intense that it’s hard to read on ... But between the passages that edge towards poetry there is some less beguiling prose. Arthur talks about a \'structure of identity\' and \'patriarchal blueprint\' ... which can make him sound more like a lecturer in cultural studies than a New York businessman born at around the time Queen Victoria died ... It’s a bold act of imaginative empathy, but you’d expect an award-winning playwright to be better at catching a voice. Perhaps she is too close to it ... The Apology is an incredibly brave attempt to make sense of what seems senseless. It’s a powerful and sometimes devastating anatomisation of harm. As an attempt at an explanation, it seems plausible, but Ensler’s view, articulated here by her father, that the \'structure\' of male identity is \'predicated on the need to destroy\', can give it the ring of sociological theory, rather than truth ... This chilling book reads like a work of catharsis. But catharsis isn’t quite the same as art.
Frank Tallis
RaveThe Sunday TimesEach story is more gripping than the last ... It is utterly compelling: the details, the dialogue, which bring each character, however heavily disguised, leaping off the page. Tallis’s years of close observation might not always have solved his patients’ problems (he is disarmingly honest about the limitations of psychotherapy) but they have helped turn him into a fine writer. He is alert to every nuance ... He knows how to tell a story. Boy, does he know how to tell a story. This powerful and moving book is not just about individual cases. It’s also about what the human animal needs.
Claire Tomalin
RaveThe Times (UK)[Tomalin has tried] to tackle her life in the way she would that of any other subject. Like any scrupulous biographer, she uses footnotes and outlines her sources. She [focuses] on the facts ... In her introductory note, Tomalin says she has tried, as Pepys did in his diaries, to give the \'texture\' of a life. This she has achieved brilliantly. What isn’t quite so clear is how many glimpses she has given us of her heart.
David Sedaris
MixedThe Times UKIn Calypso, Sedaris continues to draw on many of the themes of his earlier works, but the mood is darker. His family is now older. He and his siblings, he says at the start of the book, are now in their fifties. It is, he adds, \'just a matter of time before our luck runs out and one of us gets cancer\'. When he invites his three sisters, Gretchen, Lisa and Amy, to spend Christmas with him and his partner, Hugh, in the home they share in Sussex, it feels like a \'last hurrah\'. His description of their visit is, as always, extremely funny, a layering of anecdote, musing and memory, one you could easily call an essay ... Throughout this collection, Sedaris moves seamlessly between past and present, observation and anecdote, embarrassing revelation and moments of poignancy that sometimes make you gasp ... although there are moments when he seems to be pushing too hard for the easy gag, and when he could get more impact by ramping down instead of up ... But the odd lapse into hyperbole won’t mar the pleasure of this incredibly funny and sometimes moving meditation on love, death and family life, by a master of his craft.
