RaveThe Financial Times...the book is part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable for a world of porous borders and new forms of connectivity. Summarised like this, Exit West sounds as if it might lapse into shopworn tropes of world literature: a redemptive love story set against generalised violence and apocalypse, or an overbearing political allegory with some hokey magical realism thrown in. But this wry, intelligent novel eludes these and spins out its own narrative shapes. The opening scenes of a city sliding into civil war are brilliantly managed, precisely because the details are so restrained, and the encroachment of fear blended so unremarkably into the courtship of Nadia and Saeed ... The magical realist doors are hardly evasions or a clunky deus ex machina — quite the opposite. Unlike many press reports on 'the migrant crisis,' the narrative machinery here does not fetishise the journey but focuses instead on the destination, and what might happen next. And so it seeks to imagine a future in which the experience of mass migration has become (as it has been at many other moments of human history) an inalienable fact.
Julian Barnes
PositiveThe Financial Times...[a] novelistic reinhabiting of the composer’s world... The Noise of Time makes itself interesting by refusing such stable positions. It is a short work that dramatises an aesthetic and ethical muddle of enormous complexity — a life of immense musical triumphs counterpointed with endless compromises, humiliations and small defeats ...an episodic, diary-like work that is probably too fragmented, fidgety and neurotic to be called a historical novel, but is certainly thick with period detail ...The Noise of Time is stuffed with world historical detail. It darts from one astonishing scene to the next, lurching from the spectacular to the banal ... Other characters, particularly women, read largely as ciphers. At points The Noise of Time comes across like Julian Barnes writing impressionistic notes towards a life of Shostakovich — which of course it is; but sometimes one might like to forget that, to have more narrative momentum accrue.
