PanThe Sunday Times (UK)Unfortunately, this book is disappointing, both in its literary and science fiction aspects. The writing is prosaic ... Littered with banalities ... In the end, it’s hard to know what the point of it all is. Perhaps it is simply to follow Ari’s character arc as she tries to redress the wrongs of her life (or lives), but this feels poor compensation in a novel packed with so many big but hazy ideas.
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Taipei Story shows us a more mature Kuang, a writer who is developing her novelistic chops ... Many of Kuang’s favourite themes remain — colonialism, the slipperiness of language and translation, the problem of authenticity — but they are better incorporated into the story through the careful characterisation of Lily and the tight timeline of a single summer. The novel has a sense of restraint and sophistication. Perhaps it was realism Kuang needed to write all along.
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)At times, the book can feel repetitive, like we are covering the same ground again and again, as the characters rehash the attack. While many readers will appreciate his recreation of a lost, hidden world to the exclusion of much else, others might yearn for more focus, for the kind of intricate plotting we saw in A Brief History. But perhaps this unravelled feeling is simply because the rage that underlies this novel is unfinished — this book means it can no longer be ignored.
RaveThe Times (UK)It always feels risky to move from young adult to adult fiction ... But Albert manages the transition smoothly. The novel is sophisticated in its exploration of the complex relationship dynamics at play ... The novel takes a touch too long to reach its resolution, and its ending feels somewhat out of step with the Guin we’ve come to know. But the sheer pleasure of its reading overrides these niggles, and contemporary fantasy could certainly do with more sophisticated, updated takes on the genre like this one.
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)The reader is never given a direct account of the scene; like everything in the book, it comes to us second hand through Agathe’s crisp edicts on her generation ... In the end there is very little conclusion to the thorny problems of the novel, as it drifts into an unlikely romance. Even a ponderous read like this is enjoyable when it’s written by someone as sharply intelligent as Williams — but I wish she had retained some of the fearlessness we saw in The Doloriad.
PositiveThe Times (UK)Kovatcheva excels at building atmosphere and depicting rising tensions, and that will be enough for many readers, but there is less satisfaction to be found in what the novel has to say about the world — either the one we find in the book or our own — than the best of the genre can offer.
