RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAs William Styron once wrote, the historical novelist works best when fed on short rations. The rations at Maggie O’Farrell’s disposal are scant but tasty, just the kind of morsels to nourish an empathetic imagination ... This novel is at once about the transfiguration of life into art — it is O’Farrell’s extended speculation on how Hamnet’s death might have fueled the creation of one of his father’s greatest plays — and at the same time, it is a master class in how she, herself, does it ... O’Farrell, Irish-born, schooled in Scotland and Wales, and shaped by a childhood steeped in story and school days that always began with song, has a melodic relationship to language. There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world...She is deft, too, at keeping her research subordinated to the story. We’re not force-marched through a manual on 16th-century glove-making techniques or an exegesis of illegal practices in the Tudor wool trade. But we can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover’s workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed ... The book builds toward an intriguing speculation, which I will not reveal here. As it unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing.
Hilary Mantel
RaveAir MailMantel has redefined the work of historical fiction, pushing beyond the boundaries of the genre, getting closer to what Henry James called \'the old consciousness\' than perhaps any writer before her ... It’s all here, everything that made the last two books exceptional. Mantel does not keep us waiting ... There is big history here: the Reformation, threat of war, the shifting currents of international diplomacy. We are in strange territory, an era that can feel very foreign, when men are burned slowly with green timber for their views on infant baptism and the King of England believes witchcraft mars his potency. But what is not strange—what is achingly familiar and acutely relevant—is the way Mantel meticulously unfolds to us the nature of the human heart, all the old unchanging lusts, avarices, jealousies, hatreds and loves, the desire to live, the fear of death ... Hilary Mantel knows, even if Henry James didn’t: The human heart hasn’t changed that much. They raged as we rage. They loved as we love. And that’s why, when she puts Cromwell in the Tower, alone, thinking on his intricate, unique life as it ticks down swiftly from days to hours, he cries. Of course he does. As, almost half a millennium later, this reader cries with him
Pat Barker
PanNew York Times Book Review\"Occasionally, and briefly, Barker switches into third person. The reason for the switch remains, for this reader, unsatisfying and opaque. Nothing in particular, either narratively or structurally, seems to be accomplished by the change of voice. Indeed, both voices are, for a writer of Barker’s large gifts, curiously flat and banal ... I began to lose faith on the first page of the novel when Briseis describes the retreat of the Lyrnessus women and children, hastening from their homes to seek refuge in the citadel: \'Like all respectable married women, I rarely left my house — although admittedly in my case the house was a palace — so to be walking down the street in broad daylight felt like a holiday.\' The jarring inauthenticity of this sentence is sadly characteristic of the novel as a whole ... Unfortunately, Barker’s voices are dissonant and unpersuasive. The girls, alas, remain silenced.\
Orhan Pamuk, Trans. by Ekin Oklap
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIstanbul, his home and his muse, is the ever-present character in his novels; his city’s often-uneasy equipoise between East and West, secular and sacred, traditional and modern adding tension to whatever story is in the novel’s foreground. The Red-Haired Woman once again explores this duality ... Pamuk has a masterly control of mood in this section of the novel, and its sometimes stilted language seems apt for his half-formed, often arrogant, intellectually and sexually curious young narrator ...flits like a barn swallow over fascinating issues of contemporary Turkish life, but never alights long enough to offer interesting insights or even substantially enrich the story ...for this reader, even the relative sprint of Pamuk’s slim book seemed unsustainable.
Eowyn Ivey
RaveThe GuardianIvey manages to imbue this faux-documentary exposition with a prickly tension, a thrumming suspense shot through with foreboding ... The precision of such descriptions of the natural world ground the novel in a gritty verisimilitude that then allows Ivey to build a fanciful, daring imaginative edifice ... she manages to merge the two [storylines] at the end with an unexpected and original device that left this reader grinning with satisfaction.
