About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Maggie O'Farrell
Rave iNews (UK) [Hamnet] is a fiendishly tough act to follow, but this irresistible story set in Renaissance Italy about the third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici is every bit as evocative and spellbinding. O’Farrell, thank God, just seems to be getting better and better ... A hell of an opening paragraph, the sort that makes you want to scrap your plans for the rest of the day to find out what happens next, even if the historical note at the start strongly hints that the story is going only one way ... A nerve-shredding ride ... O’Farrell paints a picture of female defiance that feels appropriate for its time ... O’Farrell’s writing is so vivid it melts away the time and space between now and 16th-century Italy ... With The Marriage Portrait, then, O’Farrell hasn’t just produced another magnificently transporting page-turner. She has given us an exhilarating, devastating look at women’s captivity, creativity and ultimately, rebellion in a world run by some very cruel men.
Jessie Greengrass
Mixed iNews (UK) Affecting but uneven ... Packed with nature imagery...the novel artfully transmits that this is a world where the physical landscape prevails. Greengrass is unnerving in her portrait of the gradual, inevitable slide towards disaster, and how people couldn’t process what was happening ... There are some beautiful lines about grief ... But the book is let down by its structure ... The writing is also patchy, hypnotic prose weighed down by exposition ... Despite its flaws, The High House is frequently penetrating and moving on grief, childcare, the lies we tell ourselves and group dynamics.
Sarah Moss
Mixed i (UK) ... she conjures the fretful confinement of the pandemic with colossal skill. I was amazed at how much of the texture and trivial annoyances of lockdown I’d blocked out, but reading The Fell, it all comes rushing back—practically every sentence needs a trigger warning ... Yet no matter how deft and evocative Moss’s prose is, there is no getting around the fact the book forces us to relive some of the worst days of our lives. Is it good enough to justify this? Not quite. There is plenty to admire. I feared a book about lockdown would be boring, but the operation to rescue Kate is nail-biting. There are also scenes of unbearable poignancy ... Even so, the characterisation is patchy ... The ending is slightly underwhelming and the characters and their preoccupations are such a familiar take on the past year that they border on cliché. Moss captures the experience of living through lockdown, but doesn’t much move the conversation on. What we are left with is a time capsule that is both uncomfortably accurate and a bit stale.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave iNews (UK) ... stunning ... even more moving than the original book ... Strout has produced a shimmering meditation on trauma, memory and marriage – and the perverse ways we distract ourselves from painful experiences.
Natasha Brown
Rave iNews (UK) Natasha Brown’s Assembly has been heralded as one of the debuts of the year – and it more than lives up to the hype. A spare 100 pages, it is a propulsive, devastating book that charts, with a steady, unflinching eye and deft precision, what it’s like to live as a black British woman in a country still in denial about its colonial past ... The narrator’s personal unravelling is mirrored in Brown’s deconstruction of narrative conventions ... Brown’s voice is entirely her own – and Assembly is a wry, explosive debut from a coruscating new talent. The narrator’s decision around her cancer treatment might have had greater effect were it presented in terms of its everyday consequences as well as in the exhilaratingly clever abstract. Still, this is a heartbreaking novel that offers glimmers of hope with its bold vision for new modes of storytelling.
Dolly Alderton
Positive iNews Nina is a wryly entertaining narrator ... There’s much fun to be had, too, with the vivid cast of characters ... Certain tensions get resolved too neatly and it’s true that Ghosts has a slight fairytale quality to it – Nina gets to go to meetings in cool publishing houses and walk regularly on Hampstead Heath. But when it comes to human bonds and interactions it’s achingly relatable. A darkly funny-melancholic novel about the rich variety of relationships in our lives – and the importance of showing up for them.