About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Natasha Lunn
Positive iNews (UK) A moving meditation on life and loss.
Raymond Antrobus
Rave i (UK) Antrobus’s poems are elegiac, often dwelling among the dead—always reaching for another world ... his poetry transcends speech, sound, silence, words—and what we are left with, when we close this astonishing book, is the vibration of the emotion on the blank page.
Deborah Levy
Rave iNews (UK) [Levy\'s] voice – at once jokey and elliptical – is so casually intimate that it feels like catching up with an old friend ... In explicitly evoking Virginia Woolf’s diaries and novels, Levy articulates something of the mysterious power of her own memoirs ... In three moving memoirs, Levy has perfectly fused the act of writing with the art of living.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Positive iNews (UK) At times, Whereabouts feels like the loosely connected passages of a journal – a strange, abstract, interior world where the dead are more alive than the living, solitude is both an emotional and physical state, and silence chimes louder than any voice ... has a mournful quality that captures an impossible longing – for home, for family, for a past that has gone – which cannot be matched to a physical place or person ... It is in these margins, these \'whereabouts\', these words, that Lahiri finds her home.
Deborah Levy
Rave I News (UK) Reading Deborah Levy’s latest novel – longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize – is a strange, unsettling experience that grows increasingly surreal as the story unfolds, like sleepwalking into someone else’s dream ... The result is disorienting, with a political power that emerges as if through smoke ... Levy writes with such poetic economy that characterisation is sometimes sacrificed for the beauty of the sentence, but some of those sentences are so moving that they stop the reader on the page, inviting us to re-examine them, like sculptures, from every angle. The same is true of the whole: the book is so original and the words carry such force that it pulls us along to the end, leaving us wondering whether to start all over again to fully appreciate its craft. In her exploration of censorship, racism, the prohibition of desire and the limits of language, it is what Levy doesn’t say that infuses the text with such emotional resonance ... No word is wasted in this mysterious, magnificent work.