RaveFinancial Times (UK)The book pierces the abstraction of whiteness as Rankine confronts it in real, fraught physical spaces—airports, schools and suburban neighbourhoods via emergency calls to 911 operators — by asking simple, devastating questions ... Rankine’s power as a cultural commentator stems not only from her lyricism but also from her range ... Just Us is an indictment but it is also a longing for conversation, and Rankine examines deeply personal struggles of navigating her own prejudices ... It is a text for the wounded, a timely acknowledgment and communion of grief.
Isabel Wilkerson
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, an expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice ... Wilkerson’s choice of examining caste rather than race is a valuable one; this book is not about biology, social history or science, but about structural power ... Caste is a dark history of the inexhaustible scope of human violence ... This is an American reckoning and so it should be. Wilkerson has a deft narrative touch and she activates the history in her pages, bringing all its horror and possibility to light, illuminating both the bygone and the present ... It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time.
Adania Shibli, Trans. by Elisabeth Jaquette
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... [a] slim, searing novel ... Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smouldering, until it is shining off the page ... All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice; she writes of an elderly settler’s veined hands with tenderness, and as an author is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.
Adam Alter
PositiveThe GuardianThere is a tinge of first world problems in Irresistible. World of Warcraft support groups; a product Alter writes about called Realism; a spike in girl gaming addicts fuelled by Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood app – it’s difficult to see why these things should elicit much sympathy while one in 10 people worldwide still lack access to clean drinking water. This very western focus on desire and goal orientation is one that eastern thinkers might consider a wrong view of the world and its material attachments, but Alter’s pop-scientific approach still makes for an entertaining break away from one’s phone.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
RaveThe Financial Times[Nguyen] returns with a softer and more elegant form, each of his eight stories suffused with hauntings ... Nguyen writes most movingly of the debt of safety and freedom and how it impoverishes the lucky survivors; men and women who, having survived war and displacement, find themselves living in relative comfort, terrorised by an unanswerable question: why me? ... The Refugees, given its subject matter and the enormity of contemporary travel bans, racism and conflict, has a light but powerful touch ... Nguyen’s stories are to be admired for their ability to encompass not only the trauma of forced migration but also the grand themes of identity, the complications of love and sexuality, and the general awkwardness of being. For all their serious qualities, they are also humorous and smart.
