PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)\" [a] subtle, scintillating novel ... This is a story in which clichés -- of genre, of identity -- disintegrate under pressure ... From the first page Patrick’s prose has a lapidary quality. Phrases fall like beats ... Indeed, the intimacy and suppleness of Patrick’s writing mark it out from the stripped-clean default of much contemporary fiction ... The sex scenes are masterly in their combination of detail and omission ... Lacking firm anchorage in time or place, the story turns on the tension (or inextricable dynamic) between personae and inner selves.\
Tom Crewe
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Atmospheric ... As much as for its story, The New Life is compelling for its stylistic flair. Crewe’s taut prose is shot through with descriptive vividness ... Occasionally the measured quality of the writing induces the desire for some kind of rupture, a break (however transient) into a different register, though that impulse is of a piece with the psychological realism: we inhabit the characters’ striving after some other state of being.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... over 700 lucid and engrossing pages, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan retrace and distil this myth, adding facets to a figure whose celebrity became, in his lifetime, a carapace and remained as a death mask ... Much of what follows, as we enter the main act of Bacon’s life, is familiar...yet the authors give the tale a fresh momentum, a feeling of life as it happened, rather than the chiaroscuro Life that became the foundation of Bacon’s persona and the mirror image of his art. ... The women closest to Bacon emerge particularly clearly ... Bacon’s intelligence, charm, acerbity, nihilism and restlessness resonate throughout these pages ... Much of the book’s power is in inducing us to see again, from a new angle, what has previously appeared familiar ... numerous other paintings receive eloquent analyses ... not an art historian’s encomium, however, any more than it is a hagiography. The authors are candid about the second-rate quality of some of Bacon’s work, particularly in later years when he ceased to edit his output so voraciously ... One of the many marvels of Revelations is just how present and immediate Bacon is made to seem (in contrast to William Feaver’s monumental biography of Freud, in which the subject grows ever more remote and repellent). Even as he ebbs away, we see and hear him vividly ... What Revelations leaves us with powerfully is Bacon’s mercurial, electric character and a palpable sense of his body: his fluid gait, his \'flutey\' voice, and a face ever more asymmetrical as time progressed.
