RaveThe Observer (UK)It’s Mary, growing anxious on the mainland, whose bold actions will carry Davies’s memorable novel to its unexpected, delicately radical end – an end that conjures new, shared beginnings.
Julie Myerson
RaveThe Observer (UK)\"Though Myerson has built up a sizeable backlist of edgy, psychologically dark tales, this 11th novel cuts deeper than any of its predecessors. Its title may sound overly meta, but here is a book that instantly sucks the reader down into a swirling vortex of grief, trauma and powerlessness ... It’s a self-lacerating exercise that’s impossible to look away from. Sometimes cautious, occasionally accusatory, frequently rinsed of any feeling except stunned horror, the text is addressed throughout to \'you,\' meaning her daughter, though the reader can’t help but feel somehow implicated ... \'Raw,\' a word that will probably be used a lot of Nonfiction, captures its headlong intensity but simultaneously undersells the authorial alchemy at play here. Because this novel blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love, compassion and creativity. And in its bare-knuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted – it’s almost shockingly exposing. More so, perhaps, than true nonfiction ... With this new novel, the author goes further than most and the results are nothing less than incandescent.\
Susie Boyt
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Slender, intensely felt ... The ending isn’t without brutality, but is hopeful, quietly heroic, humorous even, all without lapsing into earnestness.
Diana Evans
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Does the text mirror too closely the emotional and spiritual turmoil experienced by its large cast? Yes, and there’s no denying either its meandering pace ... The sheer vitality of Evans’s dynamic prose does much to smooth over these imperfections. At once associative, poetic – florid on occasion – but girded by inquisitive precision, it renders almost hypnotic her constant toggling between the prosaic and the metaphysical. There are some deft set pieces too, dramatising intimacy’s most finely nuanced dynamics.
Catherine Chidgey
RaveThe Observer (UK)Chidgey is an agile writer, and here fuses pacy storytelling with some resonant metaphors ... The drama to come is hinted at early and often but even so, the darkness of the novel’s denouement is hard to fully anticipate ... As satisfying a narrative as Pet is, lingering uncertainty is the source of its real power, enabling it to maintain its hold over the imagination long after the final page has been turned.
K Patrick
RaveThe Observer (UK)Striking ... Lust yields subtle revelations about sexual power and selfhood ... It takes artfulness as well as conviction to pull off something so bold, and it marks the author out as a distinctive new talent. Meanwhile, there’s that heat: steamy, sticky, torrid.
Claire Fuller
MixedThe Observer (UK)Despite some promising themes and motifs, this is an uneven novel. In part, that’s a reflection of the characters’ states of mind ... Rather gimmicky devices ... The timing of this book’s publication suggests it was written at least partly during Covid lockdowns, when we were all getting a taste of the tense, sealed-in scenarios that Fuller’s fiction ordinarily probes with such mesmerising acuity. Could that be why it seems to struggle with forward momentum?
Meg Howrey
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... a luminous chronicle of betrayal, sacrifice and creative ambition, framed by New York’s Aids crisis in the 1980s and some seriously complex family dynamics ... This is by no means a flawless novel. It takes a while to warm up, falling back on therapy speak as Carlisle inspects her guilt and shame surrounding the events of that distant summer when she was exiled from her father’s home, as well as her ambivalence towards her mother, whom she’s always resented for being so easy to push away. A significant love affair, while packing plenty of heat, doesn’t wholly convince ... Yet throughout, Howrey, herself a former professional dancer, finds fresh and compelling ways to capture the discipline at her book’s heart ... And as the movement and music build to an emotional climax, she makes room for stillness and silence to startling effect ... Carlisle’s happily ever after is an elegant riposte to its more sexist elements, for here is a complicated, candid heroine who has no need of a co-star; who can hold the stage all on her own. By the book’s close, readers will be clamouring for an extra curtain call.
Lynn Steger Strong
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Consoling and unsettling in equal measure ... Strong uses this less fortunate family unit to school her characters in their own privilege. When at last they all sit down around a laden dining table, the feeling of togetherness is genuine, albeit haunted by a caveat that recurs throughout this understated, insightful novel: \'for now\'.
Louise Kennedy
RaveThe Observer (UK)Louise Kennedy sets herself the challenge of encapsulating those unspeakable times and the powerlessness felt by ordinary people caught in the crossfire. She does so with skill, combining unflinching authenticity with narrative dexterity and a flair for detail, all wrapped up in a moving love story – two, really ... Deftly calibrated.
Barbara Kingsolver
RaveThe Observer (UK)With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale ... Kingsolver’s avowedly political intent as an author...smothered the creativity of her last novel...but is for the most part more subtly integrated here despite the book’s long list of righteous campaigns ... What a story it is: acute, impassioned, heartbreakingly evocative, told by a narrator who’s a product of multiple failed systems, yes, but also of a deep rural landscape with its own sustaining traditions.
Yiyun Li
RaveThe Observer (UK)... sly, profound ... They’ve grown up together in the impoverished French village of Saint Rémy, whose mud and meadows, madmen and drunks anchor The Book of Goose, infusing its imagery and its aphoristic musings, even though Agnès narrates it from the vantage point of a very different life more than a decade on ... For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry, roaming from the nature of reality and the truth quotient of fact, memory and fiction to the instantaneousness of childhood friendship – so much more \'fatal\', as Agnès puts it, than the endlessly crooned about love at first sight. There’s room, too, for a spiky, often droll critique of what it takes out of an author to be published and compelled to engage with the outside world ... a text resonant with echoes of stories as diverse as Cinderella and My Brilliant Friend, as well as authors including Elizabeth Strout and William Trevor ... Li, who writes in English and teaches at Princeton, grew up in China and spoke in a recent New York Times interview about discovering a gift for writing propaganda as a teenager, and her horror at finding she could move an audience to tears by channelling patriotic cliches. That experience surely fuels the thrilling complexity of The Book of Goose’s relationship with the literary impulse and its sometimes sullied motives, along with the demands placed on those presumed to have a facility for word ... It’s to Li’s credit that the structural cleverness of her seventh work of fiction doesn’t obscure its defining drama, the relationship between Agnès and Fabienne; instead a sublime closing passage draws it out into the open, allowing Agnès – who was always more amanuensis than prodigy – to sign her name to the \'real\' story of the two of them, with all the possibilities and limitations that that word entails.
Rachel Aviv
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed, and the ways in which the language used – far from neutral – moulds a patient’s innermost self, promising to explain who they are by weaving narratives that free and entrap ... Aviv is an instinctive storyteller and her book’s episodic, immersive format is underpinned by in-depth reporting as she tracks down those closest to her subjects ... Woven throughout is an intimate examination of the roles that injustice and inequality play in mental distress and of the evolution and limitations of modern psychiatric practic ... Her own language is meticulous, empathic, tirelessly inquisitive. Despite – or perhaps because of – her rigour, she also dares to acknowledge facets of identity that elude any theories of the mind currently available to us and to engage with profound mystery in the form of hauntings and religious mysticism ... It’s this glimpse of a path untaken that infuses her approach to mental illness with such humility and kinship and her complex, illuminating book is all the stronger for it.
Amy Liptrot
PositiveThe Observer (UK)She makes something distinctive of this chronically hip city ... She diligently searches for love, setting off on first date after first date. It’s a quest that can be surprisingly hard to write about – or at least write about well. It’s rarely heroic and inevitably entails flesh wounds to the pride if not spears to the heart, resulting in moping and tears. And because all a person ultimately has to offer is themselves, self-absorption is hard to dodge. (Liptrot doesn’t even try) ... Liptrot fills the longueurs with musings on the role of technology in our lives ... While it lacks the stark transcendence of The Outrun, The Instant does evocatively capture – and indeed honour – much that we try to shrug off when it comes to the often calamitous pursuit of lasting intimacy.
Nuar Alsadir
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Ruminative ... Splicing sometimes dense academic theory with provocations drawn from the fraught years of the Trump presidency as well as from her own personal and professional life, she covers [diverse topics] ... Her attention to language and literature is a rich and constant pleasure. It allows her to draw impish meaning from typos and erroneous autocorrections, and yields some wonderfully startling sentences and images ... Though not svelte, Animal Joy takes the form of an extended essay. It moves with the associative fluidity of a talking-cure session ... At its best, this freeform structure feels profoundly playful ... At other times, Alsadir’s clinical training, always there in the background, obstructs the flow ... Her writing is at its most immediate, most alive, in these snatches of memoir, and they left me wishing for more ... It will leave you feeling enlightened and emboldened, and will even make you laugh.
Emma Donoghue
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... brooding, dreamlike ... this latest was a lockdown project, albeit planned pre-Covid. That perhaps accounts for the vivid sense that time is melting and days are merging ... Though this is a text replete with religious fable, it’s in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue’s prose soars and the narrative’s claustrophobia is alleviated. Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant ... While Haven certainly isn’t her most accessible novel, a flinty kind of hope brightens its satisfying ending. What the reader is likely to take away, however, is the image of a bleak place made still bleaker by human intervention. That, and a raft of early medieval survival hacks.
Melody Razak
RaveThe Observer (UK)... frames with horror and mystery – lush poetry, too – an atmospheric dramatisation of India’s troubled start and the creation of Pakistan, as told through the fate of one family of Delhi Brahmins ... even as wedding preparations gather pace, it’s hard to shake the dread instilled by the novel’s dreamlike – nightmarish, really – opening moments ... Before becoming a writer, Razak was a pastry chef and cake shop owner, and India’s culinary riches flavour her prose just so ... Other characters are just as vivid ... The sounds of muezzin that float across the city are soothing, the air is soft with the scent of jasmine and rose, and conversations are strewn with quotes from Tagore. At least, that’s how the first half of Moth reads. However, this is as much a story of the riving of naivety as it is about the loss of innocence, and partition’s agonies go abruptly from being a political tragedy, discussed over supper, to a source of intense personal anguish ... The end, when it comes, is brisk, but readers will be grateful for the hope that flutters from Razak’s closing pages. With its unflinching focus on violence against women, her strong, captivating debut tells a story that is at once firmly rooted in a time and place and yet pressingly relevant to the here and now.
Leah McLaren
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... started as a collaboration between the author and her mother but after Cessie withdrew, it ceased being a journalistic investigation into the Horseman and his crimes (there were other child victims) and became an intimate voyage into the deepest, darkest heart of motherhood and daughterhood, musing too on consent, victim narratives and the ownership of stories. The result is a work of probing insight and undaunted compassion; one that’s fearlessly engrossing, frequently funny and sometimes plain hair-raising ... Gross-out humour meets Jungian psychology as the book moves between a succession of vivid backdrops ... When it comes to her mother, McLaren’s gaze is acutely honed ... By the end of this white-knuckle ride of a book, the author is finally able to disentangle her own youthful misadventures from her mother’s trauma ... This memoir does demand a coda, though. How will it affect McLaren’s relationship with the woman who bore her? In spite of everything, it’s hard not to find yourself rooting for both parties in this untamed, yearning story of imperfect mother-daughter love.
CJ Hauser
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The book brings that same frank, funny gaze to bear on a succession of other doomed romances, mining them for complicated truths about how the love stories we inherit, consume and tell come to shape our experience and expectations. Think of it as rehab for road-weary romantics ... As an author and creative writing professor, Hauser is hyper receptive to narrative, but she makes an enthralling case for the extent to which the irresistible urge to “storify” love – to seek drama and colour – can throw us all off-course ... Does a book so relentlessly focused on one person’s pursuit of intimacy feel claustrophobic at times? Inevitably, but ultimately these essays throw open the windows, inviting us to redefine what constitutes a love story ... Of course, books about single women invariably end with them being paired off. There’s no spoiler alert required to say that one of the most invigorating aspects of this tirelessly interrogative collection is that its author remains unpartnered to the very last page. As she and the reader both can appreciate, however, this doesn’t mean that her life is without love, and it certainly isn’t the same as being alone.
Louise Hare
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Hare’s well-crafted second novel oozes glamour ... Did someone mention Agatha Christie? Yes, but with the welcome bonus of subtle reflections on race and class.
John Walsh
PositiveDaily MailFor two weeks in 1971, an air of ‘skittish playfulness’ hung over London’s Bloomsbury district thanks to an event calling itself the Bedford Square Book Bang...It made a deep impression on 17-year-old Londoner John Walsh, and would help steer him into a career in literary journalism...Looking back half a century later, he asserts that it also marked a sea change, luring writers out from behind their desks to mingle with fans...As publishing went from being a gentleman’s occupation fuelled by clubland lunches to an industry noted for whopping advances, Gatsby-esque launches and televised awards ceremonies, it inspired boozy bad behaviour and hot gossip...Walsh himself never could resist a party, and he isn’t coy about relating some saucy shenanigans involving everyone from publishing titan Lord Weidenfeld to Princess Margaret.
Benjamin Myers
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Benjamin Myers\'s latest novel, The Perfect Golden Circle, is every bit as idiosyncratic as its subject matter, combining lyricism with comedy and themes that range from warfare and environmental calamity to hope and healing...It centres on the creators of the crop circles, quintessential odd couple Redbone and Calvert...Like the characters in the author’s previous work, which spans historical fiction and rural noir, and includes the 2021 short story collection Male Tears, these men are outsiders...While Redbone lives in an old camper van, is immersed in the crust punk scene and prone to visions hallucinogenic and otherwise, Calvert is a solitary SAS veteran, battle scarred inwardly as well as outwardly from his service in the Falklands...Bathed in moonlight, Myers’s land thrums with more ancient reverberations, too...There is, he writes, \'an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics\', of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies...His main characters are acutely aware of it – their industry, it’s hinted, flows from it – and the humbling sense of perspective this confers is balm and inspiration...The novel’s title derives from a conversation between the men...As Redbone explains, there is no such thing as a truly perfect circle, it \'can only ever exist as an idea\'. Which means, he adds, \'that we each carry one within us\'...The notion neatly encapsulates the generosity of Myers’s magnetic novel, which brings together ingredients as diverse as folk song, Gaia theory and trauma, grounding them all in a memorable hymn to beauty.
Karen Jennings
RaveThe Observer (UK)... taut, tenebrous ... The claustrophobia of its setting is compounded by its timeframe, the main action taking place over just four days, yet its themes are expansive. Here is a tragic tale that grapples with colonialism, xenophobia and political resistance, along with the plight of displaced peoples ... Jennings, a Cape Town millennial, is a published poet, and flashes of linguistic brio enliven a narrative that’s largely characterised by immense weariness of both body and soul. Other aspects of her identity – notably, her whiteness – complicate her endeavour ... its deft execution and the seriousness of its political engagement serve as a potent reminder of all that such titles add to the literary ecosystem. Those same qualities should also win it readers well beyond awards season.
Nina Stibbe
RaveThe Observer (UK)Above all, there’s the voice: idiosyncratic and droll, bittersweet and clear-eyed ... Though Susan’s narrative style occasionally finds the novel ambling down cul-de-sacs (suburban dogging being one), Stibbe succeeds in depicting a character who truly evolves over the years. It’s not the crisply choreographed stuff of the classic bildungsroman, but instead a more gradual development driven as much by middle-age’s irascibility and impatience as by youthful dreams ... If ever there were a time for reading Stibbe, it’s surely now. Not for nothing was her last novel titled Reasons to Be Cheerful. And yet while comparisons with Alan Bennett, Sue Townsend or even Victoria Wood remain apt, Stibbe applies her own darkly distinctive touches ... Whereas Stibbe’s previous novels confined themselves largely to the past, One Day I Shall Astonish the World takes the reader up to the year 2020, via hashtags, gender-neutral pronouns and, of course, Covid. It’s here that its tone falters, albeit momentarily. It’s a measure of her skill as a writer that she manages to save the novel. After all, her heroines are used to having, for one reason or another, their prospects restricted, so it’s perhaps no surprise that when faced with lockdown, Susan should at last come into her own, breaking into print in her 50s just like Stibbe herself.
Elizabeth Day
RaveThe Observer (UK)When the viewpoint abruptly shifts from Marisa’s to Kate’s, Magpie becomes an altogether less predictable, more volatile story, one that revolves around the all-consuming longing and sadness of infertility, and the desperate lengths to which it can drive people ... It’s hard to do justice to her treatment of these themes without spoilers. Cannily, the tense, ultimately cathartic psychological drama that ensues explains away any shakier-seeming aspects of the book’s first section ... Day’s cleverness lies in fashioning from these ingredients a pacy, stylish thriller in which suspense is accompanied by fist-pumping feminism and, perhaps toughest of all, hope.
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
RaveThe Observer (UK)\"A love story, a ghost story, a thriller: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant first novel embraces elements of multiple genres, binding them through incantatory language steeped in the rhythms, fables and spirituality of her Trinidadian homeland ... Throughout, the supernatural is rendered in visceral terms ... It’s made all the more plausible by the gravitational pull of Banwo’s lushly delineated world— the cemetery, for instance, with its rampant foliage and gothic funerary architecture, or Morne Marie, the St Bernard family home, built on the ashes of a plantation house, its long corridors and wooden staircases indexing its transformation over the centuries ... Errol is...a splendid villain, his malevolence balanced by the savvy goodness of Shirley, keeper of all Fidelis’ records. Dickens is one of the less expected literary influences to haunt these magic-realism-inflected pages, but as the book navigates the meaning of family (it doesn’t always have much to do with biology) and inheritance (each generation gets to reshape it), its distinctiveness shines out: this is dramatic, joyful, intensely satisfying fiction.
\
Noviolet Bulawayo
RaveThe Observer (UK)Inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and drawing on elements of creaturely folktales, the author’s vigorous satire of political turmoil in her native Zimbabwe is \'peopled\' by animals ... Bulawayo finds plenty of trenchant farce and surreal humour in the situation ... When the novel flows it takes a line like \'on the other paw\' to remind us that these characters aren’t human in form, which drives home one of Glory’s most vital and universal observations: that in ordinary circumstances, it’s all too easy \'to get used to that which should have otherwise been the source of outrage\'. Whether it’s piglets and kittens or men and women who are on the receiving end of outrageous acts, it’s our task to remain indignant, and what better way to signal it than with scornful laughter.
Amy Bloom
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... [a] courageous howl of a memoir ... though never less than expertly crafted, this is a book whose temporal shifts can feel appropriately unmooring ... it’s also consistently funny. Very funny ... Heartache makes her savvy and sarcastic, a tone she pairs with a memorable descriptive shorthand whose economy underscores the ticking clock at her narrative’s centre, and all the ambivalence that represents for her ... As well as being a novelist, Bloom is a psychotherapist, intimate with all things \'shrinky\' (her word), and yet she details her own feelings – her anguish and anxiety and exhausted irritation – with disarming immediacy.
JJ Bola
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Bola’s ear for rhythm and cadence is sharp, and he lets characters soliloquise as if acing a poetry slam, their diction inflected with the street and the pulpit as they riff on cities, black history, police brutality ... If the novel’s lyricism sometimes feels over-honeyed...Michael himself remains enigmatic, keeping the reader alert. Near the end, Bola makes an interesting decision to skip a dramatic pivot point; though sure to irritate some, this imbues the book’s closing scene with mystery, and honours the weight of its themes while providing a spark of hope.
Mala Kacenberg
RaveDaily Mail (UK)... an account of astounding courage and resourcefulness, of unimaginable loss and an unshakeable will to live so that she might bear witness ... Magical though the cat of this unsentimental, profoundly moving book’s title appears—and at points I did wonder if it was more symbolic talisman than actual feline—it plays only a minor role, and the real miracle here is the vitality of Kacenberg’s faith and determination.
Sequoia Nagamatsu
MixedThe Observer (UK)Ambitious ... Nagamatsu’s zany vision extends, via a succession of first-person narrators, thousands of years into the future, incorporating interstellar travel, advanced cryopreservation and alien shape-shifters ... As the losses pile up, Nagamatsu succeeds in assembling a book that feels energetic despite its base note of mainly muted, sometimes maudlin despair. A little over halfway through, tales of endings give way to visions of new beginnings, albeit not here on Earth. It closes with a somewhat corny solution to a mystery whose seeds were planted in the first pages ... Many of these chapters have been published as short stories in the past decade. While they don’t convince as a novel, they’ve undeniably found their moment with their sustained message that love and hope continue to flicker even in the face of catastrophic pestilence.
Sarah Moss
MixedThe Observer (UK)... the suspenseful organising drama...can seem but a minor diversion in the larger metaphysical spectacle that is, well, life in the 21st-century. It’s no surprise, then, that the novel’s ending doesn’t provide quite the release or comfort that might be expected, despite its outcome. Indeed, one of the most profoundly unsettling attributes of The Fell is the way it questions that elemental source of human succour: storytelling ... \'Accumulating dread\' is what Moss atomises so brilliantly here but it should be added that this is also a very funny book. All of the characters share a certain doomy drollness ... There is an abundance of generosity, too ... With its unwavering interiority and meticulously excavated disquiet, The Fell is a novel certain to be seized upon by scholars in the future. But what of readers in 2021? Lacking the dystopian romance of Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, say, or the glamour and verve of Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends...The Fell is almost too faithful an artefact. For the time being, many readers, such as Moss’s own Alice, may prefer to reach for a dog-eared Lord Peter Wimsey than this intense time capsule of a tale.
Charlotte Higgins, Illus. by Chris Ofili
RaveThe Observer (UK)... erudite and exhilerating ... Gusseted with a map, family trees, notes and glossaries, this feminist corrective oddly recalls the kind of old-fashioned mythological compendia that Higgins grew up with ... Higgins’s own volume is illustrated by the Turner prize-winning Chris Ofili, whose drawings are charming and airy, suggestive in spirit of Matisse’s pencil sketches. While they undoubtedly beautify an already alluring object, the deeper Higgins leads the reader into her forest of tales, the less necessary they feel.
Claire-Louise Bennett
RaveThe Observer (UK)A portrait of fidgety, defiant eclecticism, this is a book that refuses to abide by conventional expectations of storytelling, shifting from the first to the second to the third person as it loosely chronicles its heroine’s journey from school (anyone who made it through an ex-secondary modern some 25 years ago will relate acutely) to university and beyond ... Rambling, sparsely punctuated sentences often repeat themselves and its conversational style – \'that’s right\', the narrator likes to reassure herself – contrasts with a satisfyingly recondite vocabulary, running to words such as ouroboros and autotelic. Along the way, stellar comic riffs on the horrors of a shared packet of crisps illustrate how popularity in the playground (and in general) is nothing but a trap and fantasies about rocking up to the Lancôme counter with a scrap of period-stained loo roll and asking the sales assistant to colour-match a lipstick nod to gross-out feminism ... While Checkout 19 may frustrate the reader’s desire for basic details about its protagonist’s background (like Bennett, she grows up in south-west England then moves to Ireland, while we learn of a sibling only near the very end), it luxuriates in long passages of lit crit. Has a novel ever squeezed on to its pages the titles of so many other books? ... What emerges, all the more affectingly for being so serpentine, is an invigorating portrait of the artist as a young – and then older, surer – woman ... Turn the final page of this most uncompromising of works and you’ll be filled with admiration for the way in which its freewheeling momentum turns out to have been so sinuously choreographed, its every mystery, commonplace and apparently defunct deviation mesmerically apposite.
Ann Patchett
RaveThe Observer (UK)... intimate, elegant essays ... radiant storytelling, both questing and vulnerable in its candour ... contains some masterclass-grade tips on writing, but it confronts, too, the extent to which literature and life diverge: people aren’t characters; our daily hurryings and scurryings do not a plot make. And while Patchett can’t start work on a novel without having figured out exactly how it will end, living well requires the opposite: \'Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have left,\' she advises. As a rallying call, it’s timely, timeless and as full-voiced as her smile is broad.
Anthony Doerr
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... to an impressive extent, it succeeds. Wonderment and despair, love and destruction and hope – all find their place in its sumptuously plotted pages, along with a generous smattering of classical philosophy ... Though it isn’t short, Cloud Cuckoo Land’s lyrical, propulsive pages feel like a feat of compression. After all, this is a book that draws on the entire past, present and future of human civilisation. As well as a tribute to the magic of reading, Doerr has pulled off something timelier. Through its exploration of loss, heroism and destiny, Cloud Cuckoo Land grapples with the climate crisis and humankind’s culpability, and does so with wisdom and clemency. By its close, a novel characterised by its questing nature for “the mysteries beyond” has become an ode to home.
Tahmima Anam
PositiveThe Observer (UK)From the all-consuming social media platform that hogs centre stage to the deadly pandemic that looms over its ending, The Startup Wife pulses with up-to-the-minute topicality ... The end result may not be entirely persuasive philosophically, but as high-octane entertainment that hits notes poignant as well as savagely witty, it soars ... Asha can’t decide whether she’s been betrayed or merely sidelined at WAI; all she knows is that she isn’t about to let Cyrus take the credit ... While it doesn’t altogether fit with how the story unfolds, and it certainly isn’t going to help tech address its chronic and very real women problem (not necessarily fiction’s job anyway), it does disrupt the familiar feeling of disempowerment that comes with victimhood. It also feels true that to Asha, amid the glossy allure of Utopia, any level of unvarnished authenticity seems downright subversive.
Clare Sestanovich
RaveThe Observer (UK)... sublimely polished ... Sestanovich’s heroines are surrounded by mess of one kind or another, but there’s nothing sloppy about them ... There’s plenty of mischief in these tales, and it’s particularly sharp when aimed at the literary scene ... At times, Sestanovich almost seems to be parodying the spareness of her chosen form and the volumes that it leaves unspoken ... These stories are nothing if not topical ... If it sometimes feels as if we get no closer to these immaculately drawn characters than the eavesdropper on the next table, it’s worth noting that they’re partly estranged from their own lives, or at least from the moments that Sestanovich captures so commandingly. In this way, her pleasurable, discrete dramas achieve something extra: along with their acute social observations and pithy elegance, they collectively probe the gap between how we’re seen and how we might long to appear.
Rivers Solomon
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A stirring sense of the epic animates this striking novel ... This capaciousness is echoed in the sheer range of Sorrowland’s timely preoccupations. It’s about escape, self-acceptance and queer love. It’s about genocide and the exploitation of black bodies, self-delusion and endemic corruption, motherhood and inheritance. Its frame of reference is generous – in some ways, it’s clearly rooted in Afrofuturism, owing plenty to Octavia Butler, but it nods as well to Giovanni’s Room, Robin Hood and folklore from multiple cultures ... Sounds like a lot? It is, and you’ll certainly find extraneous material here, including a motel-room orgy attended by a couple of ghosts. And yet Solomon matches their ambition with a propulsive plot whose intense conviction and sheer vitality make up for any shaky logic where the likes of colonising fungi and resurrections are concerned ... As for memory, ensuring that past wrongs don’t go forgotten isn’t enough for Vern, who, though still a girl by the novel’s end, has taken ownership of the adrenaline, anger and appetite that drive her. Solomon’s audacity lies in imagining at least some of those wrongs not only remembered but put right, and in dreaming up powers potent enough to make it so.
Michelle Zauner
RaveThe Observer (UK)... a vibrant, soulful memoir that binds her own belated coming-of-age with her mother’s untimely death, and serves up food, music and, yes, tears alongside insights into identity, grief and the primal intensity of the mother-daughter bond ... The book’s middle chapters make for difficult reading, and yet Zauner never loses sight of the person her mother was. Chongmi is beautifully observed ... That droll tone is a vital ingredient in Zauner’s prose, but it doesn’t obscure her honesty ... It’s this modest scepticism that sets Zauner’s book apart from so many other grief memoirs. She isn’t looking for readily formulated fixes, and instead remains open to truths that are hard to put into words in any language.
Helen Oyeyemi
RaveThe Observer (UK)It may be laden with whimsical details and witticisms, but the opening chapter of Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces feels grounded given her penchant for disorienting fables ... this smart, inventive narrative moves with antic momentum, darting between past and present, and from storyline to storyline ... One of the joys of Oyeyemi’s work is its quicksilver ability to resist straightforward interpretation. The train was once used to smuggle tea, for instance, but good luck to any critic seeking to peg this as an allegory about empire. Similarly, while answers to its puzzles generally materialise, they’re almost beside the point in a text that responds to every question with a story, followed by more questions ... While the title alludes to an Emily Dickinson poem, it’s impossible not to think of it in a different spelling. Ultimately, the book’s \'pieces\' come together more in the way of glass beads in a kaleidoscope – transiently, but forming dazzling patterns with each turn.
Megan Nolan
RaveThe Guardian (UK)There are toxic relationships, and then there’s the relationship at the centre of Megan Nolan’s fearless debut. From compulsive beginning to violent end, the love affair between the novel’s narrator [...] and the older Ciaran, a half-Danish poet, is supremely messed up ... But the novel’s less lurid confessions are almost more disturbing ... It’s amusing, relatable, crushing. What galvanises the narrative in lieu of plot is the fierce urgency that Nolan, a New Statesman columnist, brings to her heroine’s musings. In particular, this is a book with plenty to say about victimhood and sexual violence, about the way women censor their own needs and ironise or eroticise their abasement. While some of this is provocative, it’s all rendered in prose that is bright and warm. Nolan’s gutsiest achievement, however, is reclaiming the female experience of love and desire in all its shades from lighter literature, making of it something frequently unpretty – unromantic, really – yet intensely vital and worthy of examination. Like some kind of fairytale quest, in doing so she frees her narrator.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
RaveThe Observer (UK)This incandescent, uncategorisable prose debut is...many things—a reimagining of an 18th-century life that combines scholarship with imaginative verve; an account of obsession and a meditation on the limits of biography; a memoir of post-feminist motherhood ... when it comes to prose, is incapable of delivering a dud sentence ... [Ní Ghríofa] is incapable of delivering a dud sentence. This is a text that glints with treasures ... In entwining her own existence with the story of a lauded poem and its overlooked author, she busts open the idea of the female text to encompass not merely self-sacrifice and scars, but also merriment, desire, and fierce, sustaining curiosity.
Cherie Jones
PositiveThe Observer (UK)This being the 1980s, shoulder-padded jumpsuits add colour to a narrative intensely flavoured with Bajan patois and local dishes (how about lentils with tarragon and coconut milk?), gospels and reggae. Jones’s fondness for repetition strikes an incantatory note but becomes claustrophobic, too, since the punches keep coming, explicitly detailed until language itself breaks down ...Its victim is once again Lala, still only 18 years old and named after a song by a mother she scarcely knew. Her mother’s story is sickeningly familiar but also, we discover, incomplete. Omitted is a moment of rebellion, of fighting back. Futile, since she still died at her husband’s hand and yet, in the context of this uncompromisingly clear-eyed novel, it almost passes for hope, a glimmer of light at the end of a labyrinthine tunnel.
Vendela Vida
RaveThe Guardian (UK)What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence, its on-the-cusp caprices and confusions, as well as the more timeless riddles of independence and identity, seduction and storytelling.
Melissa Febos
PositiveThe Observer (UK)[G]irlhood will not only speak to you, it will also ignite fury that two words like \'ordinary\' and \'violation\' should ever have cause to couple. A capacious blend of memoir and reportage, history and cultural criticism, its seven essays loosely chart Febos’s journey from girlhood to womanhood ... Febos is a skilled storyteller; her prose pulses with drama and colour, light and darkness. There are frequent gear-shifts, and while these generally work – the mix of genres and range of references feel in the spirit of a book in which solace comes from uniting with others – they do produce the odd cumbersome sentence ... After all, this is a book that is acutely aware of the coercive power of narrative, and the limits that the available narratives continue to place on girls. Narratives, in short, are to be disrupted.
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell
RaveThe Observer (UK)When it comes to book reviewing cliches, the word \'haunting\' is surely among the tattiest, yet Mariana Enríquez’s newly translated short story collection restores to that tired adjective all its most mysterious, fearful strangeness ... shares the exuberantly macabre sensibilities of her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire, which it in fact predates ... There is nothing wraithlike about these apparitions. Instead, they acquire a pushy, malevolent physicality, not so much ghosting Enríquez’s generally female protagonists as possessing them, driving narratives that work a similarly tenebrous magic on the reader, even as gross-out details are layered on like a dare ... Pornography, paedophilia, necrophilia – nothing is out of bounds here, but there is jet-black humour, too ... She’s already attracted comparisons with Shirley Jackson, but lashings of local mysticism and a flair for transgressive imagery make her an arrestingly original talent. Do all of these stories come off? Not quite. Nevertheless, it’s a collection amply deserving of its spot on the longlist for this year’s International Booker prize.
Una Mannion
RaveThe Guardian (UK)While Una Mannion’s debut ably fulfils the promise of its suspenseful start, providing carefully orchestrated lawlessness, bare-fisted violence and a long-haired predator sinisterly named \'Barbie Man,\' this is no crime novel ... Some of her epiphanies give off a distinctly YA vibe and nods to forces shaping the wider world – strip mining, hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, America’s blinkered exceptionalism – can feel like an overreaching distraction. Where Mannion excels is in evoking a time and a place that’s slipping away even as she pins it to the page with such perceptive, lyrical economy ... Yoking a classic coming-of-age narrative to the pacier engine of a thriller takes skill and A Crooked Tree is more than persuasive, emanating nostalgia, foreboding and clear-eyed empathy.
Kevin Barry
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Passion proves hazardous for the loners and oddballs who drift through Barry’s forceful landscape ... Written over the course of eight years, these stories aren’t quite of equal strength, but throughout, their language is exhilarating, its verve evoking the very best of Barry’s compatriots while further carving out a territory that’s all his own.
Yaa Gyasi
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... a piercing story of faith, science and the opioid crisis ... the heat and faith of the deep south shimmer on the page, localising the immigrant experience ... it’s in its heroine’s frank efforts to defuse the dichotomy between religion and science that Transcendent Kingdom really sings. There’s bravery as well as beauty here ... There’s also the novel’s back-and-forth structure, which can become repetitive, sapping its momentum, and a brisk addendum feels at once too much and too little. All the same, these are relatively small quibbles when stacked against the successes of a narrative that contrives to be intimate and philosophical.
Diane Cook
RaveThe Observer (UK)... soulful, urgent ... Cook is adept at matter-of-factly deploying unadorned detail to deadpanning, gut-plummeting effect ... a propulsive narrative ... The push-pull ambivalence of Bea and Agnes’s bond forms its beating heart ... it is through Agnes’s eyes that the bulk of this supremely well-crafted adventure unfolds. Her wild girl observations and lack of inhibition can be at once humorous and lightly menacing, as when the plump legs of a woman freshly arrived from the City make her hungry ... So much else is broached in these vivid, timely pages: tribalism, courage, consumption, storytelling itself – an art that Cook spirits back to its spark-enlivened, campfire origins. What lingers, though, beyond the awesome power of Bea and Agnes as heroines, is pure wonderment at all in this world of ours that is not human.
Priya Basil
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Reading this slender, rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party. The food is mouth-watering – creamy curries, candied baobab seeds, fat slices of homemade pizza – but just as nourishing is the conversation, which embraces hospitality in its many guises, from the strained welcome received by Syrian refugees in the author’s adoptive Germany to the langar, a free meal served in Sikh temples ... Add a pinch of Derrida and a slug of retro pop culture, and you’ve got an irresistible amuse-bouche.
Joyce Carol Oates
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)An immersive, discursive chronicle of a family’s reconfiguration following the death of its patriarch...and an otherworldly chord resonates through portions of its narrative ... Despite its bulk, this is a novel that doesn’t so much sprawl as scamper, at times darting purposefully off in the direction of a deadpan comedy of manners, a courtroom drama, a philosophical enquiry into the nature of art. It also provides a timely as well as damning snapshot of race relations and police brutality in the US ... There is much to relish in Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars., from its nimble pace to exuberant set pieces. As a portrait of a family and a nation, it’s funny and tragic and sometimes bleak. Indeed, if there’s fault to be found it’s simply that the novel reads like multiple books in one, and, inevitably, some of its narrative strands get passed over too quickly. This is particularly true of the sections dealing with police racism and its fallout. Though they’re vividly rendered, in order for the novel to hang together as a whole they must ultimately be subsumed by the overarching narrative, that all-American quest for self-realisation. In this case, the self-realisation of privileged white people. Given the intense topicality conferred by George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests, it makes for an uncomfortable juxtaposition.
Elisabeth Thomas
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Gothic horror provides the architecture for an arrestingly strange melange of speculative fiction and teen trauma in this atmospheric debut novel ... Ines’s apathy can drag but nibbling menace spurs the plot onwards.
Emma Jane Unsworth
RaveThe Observer (UK)Emma Jane Unsworth’s virtuoso new novel is far too canny to convey anything so gauche as a \'message\', but if it did, it would be this: step away from your screen ... Adults is a tale rich in keenly observed relationships – between mothers and daughters, best friends and boyfriends, idols and rivals – yet its central, inseparable pairing is that of thirtysomething heroine Jenny and her phone. Theirs is a supremely dysfunctional affair ... Daffy one-liners, trenchant satire, misadventure of the laugh/cry variety – the narrative pops with all of the above as it parses everything from selfhood to attraction ... Though she’s a dauntingly able all-rounder ... it’s as a comedic writer that Unsworth sparkles, and her quickfire wit synthesises perfectly with her theme in Adults, mimicking the relentless pace of the internet. Yet like the very best of her kind, she creates a world complex enough that in the echoes of our laughter are also relatability, wistfulness, even hope. All are present in this novel’s satisfying close.
Kiley Reid
RaveThe Observer (UK)... [a] standout first novel ... There’s something a touch too tidy about the way Alix’s character develops, and it’s true that the plot pivots on an almighty coincidence. All the same, Reid writes with a confidence and verve that produce magnetic prose, and she’s a whiz at dialogue, whether it’s the African-American vernacular that Emira slips into with her girlfriends or Briar’s bold toddler-talk ... While race dominates, Reid is far too engaged a writer to let it define a narrative that has equally incisive observations to share about everything from maternal ambivalence to dating mores and dining fads. Hypocrisy and forgiveness get a look in, and in some respects, this is a novel that’s as much about money and class as anything. All in all, it’s a cracking debut – charming, authentic and every bit as entertaining as it is calmly, intelligently damning.
Jessie Burton
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Uniting the two eras are the challenges that come with womanhood (this is a novel with zero memorable male characters). Both marriage and motherhood are portrayed as threats to the female self, and it’s Connie – mercurial and imposing, yes, but also single and childless – who comes to dominate the story even as age weakens her. That she’s capable of shocking callousness makes her all the more interesting. While Burton resists easy conclusions, calling out the perverse comfort that’s to be had from abandonment and the myriad other ways in which a lover’s hurt can justify shabby behaviour, she does have a weakness for treacly dialogue ... It’s one of relatively few flaws in an absorbing, intelligent piece of storytelling that succeeds in sustaining its mystery to the end.
Tracy Chevalier
RaveThe Observer (UK)You’ll hear echoes of the estimable Barbara Pym as Violet’s heels clip across the cathedral’s inner close. Allusions to casual sex and lesbian passion notwithstanding, days are punctuated by cups of tea and people remain largely trapped by their manners. At one particularly stirring moment, instead of finding herself kissed, Violet is treated to a three-course meal ... It’s a time and a place that is perfectly suited to Chevalier’s meticulous scene-setting, gentle pacing and gimlet eye for hidden hurts and secret longings. As for the embroidery, with its repetitive stitches that slowly, almost inconspicuously add up to something dazzling, she couldn’t have picked a more satisfying metaphor. After all, Violet and her fellow broderers are women building not only themselves, but the very idea of independent single womanhood in a world that does its best to ignore their existence.
Jacqueline Woodson
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... profound, moving and consistently unexpected ... Iris is a difficult, brilliantly realised character, and one whom the author never judges ... a book that embraces class, desire, race, gender, ambition and tragedy, all with exemplary subtlety. The word \'margarine\', for instance, conveys a world of socioeconomic differences; the fierceness with which a baby latches on contains all the seeds of a complex mother-daughter relationship ... pure poetry, filled with incantatory repetitions, soaring cadences, burnished images. There is laughter and spirit, \'fire and ash and loss\', blocks of gold hidden beneath squeaky stairs. It’s a story laden with stories, too. As Sabe says, \'If a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story.\' Woodson does just that, weaving a narrative whose specificity yields an undeniable universality. We grownups have been missing out.
Angie Cruz
MixedThe Observer (UK)...a grim portrait of what it means to be doubly disenfranchised as a female illegal immigrant in an oppressively patriarchal community ... In the acknowledgments of this absorbing if imperfect exploration of the transactional bargains that women are forced to strike is a plea for film and photographic footage of New York’s Dominican community from the 1950s to the 1980s. The kind of colour that such an archive might yield is precisely what’s missing from the narrative. While its Dominican sections evoke skin that tastes of the ocean, a place where the ground is strewn with ripe apricots and radios fill the air with song, in the main it could be set almost any time, any place. There are moments, too, when the dialogue seems jarringly anachronistic.
A K Benjamin
RaveThe ObserverThe eight lines that preface Let Me Not Be Mad slice straight to the singed, fast-beating heart of a mental-health memoir like no other ... Benjamin is kinetic company, his rangy intelligence matched with a fondness for rarefied locution (he can never resist a \'lickerish\' mouth) and indelible images ... The book’s second half fuses an alarming, increasingly claustrophobic psychodrama with irresistibly sharp cultural commentary that makes even greying bugbears such as listicles and the misuse of the word \'literally\' seem fresh ... this is a text that constantly interrogates the very act of narrativisation, together with its limitations and the tricks that our minds play on us with it ... a wild, genre-defying wake-up call of a book.
Damien Barr
PositiveThe Observer\"...a polished and harrowing debut novel ... These distinct narratives are equally convincing. Both have been extensively researched....yet that learning is worn lightly, and Barr shifts between two very different tones with a light touch, maintaining a subtle emotional intelligence throughout. There are moments of almost shocking drollery, too...Meanwhile, the harsh poetry of the land anchors the text, its red earth stretching out beneath starlit stillness, unchanging from generation to generation ... Homophobic violence overshadows the brutal closing section of You Will Be Safe Here but it’s the connections between then and now that make it so devastating ... By its end, so many instinctive responses will have been upturned that the reader will be left with just two certainties: that the circularity of man’s cruelty to his fellow human beings is endless, and that only kindness is stronger.
Jamel Brinkley
RaveThe ObserverOften, the story we start out reading turns out to be a feint, yet none of this tips over into tricksiness. Whether they’re focused on the racism that’s inherent in a certain kind of charity or the complications of dual heritage identity, these are all urgent, intimate narratives, framed as confessions and quests, and edged with quickening threat. Everything that is good can be ruptured with as little as a single accidental touch, \'quiet as two lips parting\', and despite his great feeling for beauty and grace, Brinkley is unafraid to probe the ugliest lows of human behaviour ... Throughout, there’s an enigmatic quality to his prose that makes the sharpness of his observations still more dazzling ... These nine near-faultless stories are laden with similarly pocketable treasures, not only heralding the arrival of a fully formed, entirely distinctive new voice but reinvigorating the short story itself. In the end, there’s no doubt who the lucky ones are: we, the readers.
Hermione Hoby
RaveThe Guardian...a smart, shimmering study of youthful self-discovery and the power of place ... There’s an extent to which any coming-of-age novel – any novel, full stop – set in New York City is treading ground already so mythologised, so narrativised, that it is impossible to make it feel real. Hoby nods to this ... while it resists narrative neatness, the book’s prose is impressively precise, glinting with pocketable images and insights.
Peter Carey
MixedThe Seattle TimesThough technically Olivier's servant, Parrot is almost twice his age and infinitely more wise about the world; his first impressions of ‘Lord Migraine’ are hardly flattering. Olivier, in turn, regards his uppity servant with appalled fascination, complaining to his mother in shipboard letters that Parrot himself takes on dictation. Their relationship develops into what Hollywood would call a ‘bromance,’ yet this agile and almost too facile novel aspires to be more than just the tale of an odd couple … Thematically, this is an aptly restless novel, touching on forgery, exile and loyalty before settling on the question of whether art can flourish in a democracy. Olivier, like Tocqueville, fears not. Parrot, who becomes the publisher of a folio of prints of American birds, disagrees … For all its madcap energy and playful accomplishments, the novel lacks the dark shadows that make the best comedies truly memorable.
