RaveThe Independent (UK)On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same ... I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of – but dully. Sublime literature will do this for you.
Rumaan Alam
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Much of the fun after reading lies in teasing out how much of Alam’s excoriating gaze is aimed at his characters ... It bears pointing out that there is something slightly fatiguing about her ill-advised behaviour in the workplace ... There is no reason, however, to hold this against Entitlement too strongly. Alam’s writing is never more brilliant than when it ridicules corporate America.
Olivia Laing
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Remarkably vulnerable in its function as a vehicle for Laing to think through the pain of others; to mend her own shortcomings and live purposively on her patch of land. Whatever occasional disagreements I had with it were fruitful, bred by a spirit of intended generosity imbued within the text.
Lottie Hazell
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Hunger in all its forms is central to Lottie Hazell’s debut novel, and the discomforting nature of Piglet’s name is not unearned ... The novel’s great revelations lie in uncomplicatedly virtuous scenes that disappoint the promises wrought by class standoffs and ostentatiously ripped wedding attire ... It’s difficult to feel satisfaction over the simplicity of her self-flagellation at the end ... Piglet is an easy novel to pass a Sunday afternoon with, but Hazell’s chosen points of interest are valiantly inflammatory ones, and one wishes they were interrogated less politely. Perhaps next time, they might be.
Kate Briggs
MixedThe Guardian (UK)It’s useful for a critic to be met, every so often, with a novel that gently, determinedly, requests a purity of care from the person holding it. Kate Briggs’s debut work of fiction is one such novel ... Briggs’s greatest achievement would be to move between...propositions harmoniously – and sometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect ... Interrogate the experience of motherhood, the meaning of the novel form and the potential to break its limits in one fell motion. At times, this makes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken. But too often, the links between polemic and experience are made excessively clear. Good novels teach their readers how to understand them on their own terms. The Long Form contains too many instances of outright handholding ... The book is worse off for its neurotic inability to allow its audience to think as freely as it does; for quashing the very life force it stutteringly, and sometimes luminously, generates ... It fails too often to meet its own ambitions.
Sophie Mackintosh
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh’s skill, set in a semi-rural postwar French town ... This is a book about the power desire and greed exert over reality and memory ... Cursed Bread presents a subtler rendering of how enough desperation behind the words \'I want\' can make one ill, and is all the more gripping for it ... Mackintosh has entered a brilliant new stage of writing.
Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd
RaveNew York Times Book Review[All the Lovers in the Night] hinges on this double bind created by the feminine ideal: the gloom spawned by a woman’s inevitable failure to measure up to impossible standards of beauty and likability, coupled with a lack of any other available framework through which she can view herself or her peers ... There is a cleverness with which All the Lovers in the Night addresses these changes, romantic and professional, in its protagonist’s life. By including alcoholism among them, Kawakami circumvents the shtick of stale \'glow-up\' narratives, and preserves Fuyuko as a cipher ... What makes Kawakami’s novel so brilliant is an understanding of why women might willingly adhere to regressive modes of performative femininity, even while they criticize it. The desire to be loved is no small thing ... Kawakami’s novel is uncompromisingly candid in its appraisal of the harm women inflict on one another, while never losing sight of the overarching structures that lead them to do so in the first place. Compact and supple, it’s a strikingly intelligent feat.
Uwem Akpan
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAkpan is precise in balancing his main character’s (at times) naïve optimism with his reader’s knowledge of class and race-based homogeneity in Western publishing ... But to summarize the book as a satire on New York’s publishing industry belittles its aims ... Akpan’s examination of the publishing industry serves less to mock and more to chart the ways in which narrative is essential in the forming of cultural groups ... There are some technical faults in the novel. Moments of wit are often lost to poorly structured sentences, an abundance of too-apt proverbs and monologued exposition. A better edit might have highlighted Akpan’s obvious gift for characterization and arresting images...It is a shame such formal potential is not more carefully honed ... Still, New York, My Village succeeds in making the too-rare observation that identity exists not as a fixed, individual thing, but in relation to others, and thus is constantly shifting. To those who forget this, Akpan extends a depth of kindness and forgiveness that gives this sometimes frustrating, but ultimately illuminating, book its sense of hope.
