RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewFor Thomas, nothing seems to be off the table. She shifts between erotic thrills, gothic drama, postmodern deconstruction and kitchen-sink realism. Through her bold storytelling, The Sleepwalkers becomes a work of peculiar, gonzo genius ... Thomas takes a glamorous late-capitalist setting, with rosé and catamarans, and shreds, twists and warps it into a story that is surprising, humane and political to its bones.
Stephen King
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Here is a thriller scary enough to test its readers’ mettle—and toughen them up ... Like Kate Atkinson in her Jackson Brodie series, King writes a procedural with Dickensian scope ... From vaccinations to the Capitol riot, Holly charges into the thorniest contemporary debates with gleeful recklessness. With the same abandon, King bends the rules of a procedural, not least by revealing the perpetrators’ identities in the opening chapter...King’s gambles pay off: Knowing the professors’ culpability only gives the narrative more urgency, especially as the gruesome nature of their crimes becomes horrifyingly clear ... What makes King’s work so much more frightening than that of most other suspense writers, what elevates it to night-terror levels, isn’t his cruelty to his characters: It’s his kindness. King describes his characters’ interior landscapes, their worries and plans, with a focus like a giant benevolent beam. You can sense the goodness running through them, and that current of goodness is what makes the acts of violence so disturbing.\
Hila Blum
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA lively, vivid translation ... In Blum’s prose, the often invisible chores of caregiving are loaded with mystery and portent ... Its intrigues and revelations are dramatic enough to be wholly satisfying. Its final pages had me holding my breath, desperate to find out if Yoella will be condemned to a life without her daughter, or if she will be pardoned.
Adam Sternbergh
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn stylish prose, Sternbergh constructs a lustrous domestic suspense novel ... The novel has an almost midcentury coolness in tone, and Daisy, an actor, is like a Hitchcock blonde, self-contained and enigmatic ... Deliciously entertaining, but its portrait of a marriage in trouble is nuanced and serious, hopeful and melancholy. There are real impacts under its glitter.
Abigail Dean
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewGirl A, Abigail Dean’s debut novel, shares a kinship with Emma Donoghue’s Room and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in its harrowing portrayal of trauma. Like those titles, Girl A is certain to rouse strong emotions. It is a haunting, powerful book, the mystery at its heart not who committed a crime, but how to carry on with life in its aftermath ... I kept wanting to read Girl A as a fairy tale or parable, to cauterize some of the suffering in its pages, but Dean resists that impulse at every turn, always rooting Lex’s story in the real. Dean looks squarely at the sort of parents who humiliate their children, or hit them, or deny them food, and the consequences of such monstrousness ... Dean tells this story with such nuance and humanity, you’re desperate to step into its pages. To help.
Alex North
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... assured ... North has an eye for moments of skewed dailiness ... These visual details are so effective that the more explicit beats of foreboding feel extraneous. The set-piece scenes — that school fight, a visit to a suspect’s house — are beautifully paced and surprising. As in his debut, The Whisper Man, North is aware of how a good horror novel can subtly rearrange a reader’s surroundings, charging them with menace, and he nods to the tradition with references to The Monkey’s Paw and The Shining ... absorbing, headlong reading, a play on classic horror with an inventiveness of its own. In the third act, a revelation upends both the entire narrative and its emotional valence. Such a major double-cross is risky. Somehow, though, the twist comes across not as a metafictional, authorial intervention, but as the work of a character struggling to survive a grinding loss. As with all the best illusions, you are left feeling not tricked, but full of wonder.
