PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)A clever conceit ... Takes some getting used to ... This is an action- and dialogue-heavy caper, ripe for screen or radio adaptation, where these inconsistencies will no doubt pose less of a problem. There is little time during its unstoppable acceleration towards a too hasty conclusion for deep insights into its themes, but this does not detract from the joy of the journey.
Richard Flanagan
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Only a window separates the two worlds of Richard Flanagan’s new novel: a world of human control, in which every act is a kind of triumph over nature; and the world outside, where apparently limitless life is being steadily reduced to cinders. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a meditation on the fragility of this window, the wilful denial of our connection to nature, and the inexorable pull of \'a place of quiet and green, of reverie, perhaps transcendence\' ... The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is strewn with arresting images and turns of phrase; it is a powerful story about \'so many sacred worlds\' now \'vanished into a sooty smear\'. But at times it feels like the narrative itself is guilty of the same cursory scrolling that it deplores ... But the author’s less-is-more approach to these strands ends up feeling like a disservice to the people in them – and a symptom, perhaps, of a wider loss of faith in the power of literature itself.
Cynan Jones
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Jones creates a stiflingly bleak world ... Everything is rationed – even Jones’s prose, which rarely allows for more than a couple of sentences per paragraph. It can be a jarring experience to read, but it seems to suit this world where resources have been depleted and the seas are empty of fish. Less a linear narrative than a layering of images, Stillicide is an exercise in matching literary form to a visual idea: as Cynan Jones’s sparse, clear words accumulate down the page, we are left feeling the chill of a slowly melting iceberg.
