RaveThe Times Literary SupplementPart of [Norris\'s] considerable convivial appeal is rooted in her knack for picking up unconsidered linguistic trifles, giving them a quick verbal sleeve-polish, then turning them over to reveal their multifaceted gleam. In her second book, Greek to Me, she demonstrates this gift with still greater aplomb ... It is clear that Norris wishes to share Greek, and the joy she finds in it, with the lay reader and latent philhellene – not necessarily the committed classicist, but simply the person with an interest in the roots and hidden layers of words ... This infectious excitement should win over even the stuffiest of classicists ... Throughout the book, as though to avoid the peril of playing with words to the point where they lose their relevance to human life, Norris provides a vivid sense of physical, visceral experience.
Jason Lutes
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement...transporting, challenging, enormously ambitious ... Lutes wisely refuses to allow the grim shared knowledge of what will come to bleed into Berlin ahead of time. Instead, he distracts the reader by ensuring that there is simply too much happening. In Lutes’s febrile, starving, idealistic, iconoclastic city, violence contends with vivacity ... Immersed in the richly absorbing detail of these single and familial lives, we only perceive the danger signs obliquely, the indication that, bit by bit, fascism is coalescing like mercury into a single, fluid, deadly entity ... The last few double-page spreads are imbued with a breathtaking silent power. We see an aerial view of Berlin bombed and blazing; a hushed, deserted image of the divided city; and then – the first note of colour in the book – the vivid, graffiti-covered Berlin Wall against a monochrome background, breached in one small section as though to allow for the passage of hope. It is an extraordinary achievement, resonating all too cogently in a contemporary climate of mistrust, tribalism and the resurgence of the far right.
