About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Elizabeth O'Connor
Positive The Guardian (UK) Evocative and haunting ... If the book has weaknesses, they are mainly structural in origin. Occasionally, the interpolated testimonies become interruptive, no longer meaningfully juxtaposed with the narrative moment. And some dialogue scenes are frustratingly lacking in conflict ... For the most part, written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel.
Toby Lloyd
Rave The Guardian (UK) [A] slow burn ... The quality of Lloyd’s prose alone ensures that anything he writes next will be worth investigating.
Louise Kennedy
Rave The Guardian (UK) Dazzling, heartbreaking ... With their sensitivity to people’s vulnerabilities and failings, and their sharpness of imagery, these 15 taut tales recall Annie Proulx at her best: salty, wise, droll and keen to share the lessons of a lifetime.
Xialou Guo
Rave The Guardian (UK) Marvellous ... Guo’s novelistic skills are apparent in the way no image or motif in Radical is accidental or wasted ... Digressive, intellectually rich and stimulating.
Catherine Lacey
Rave Times Literary Supplement (UK) The author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books. Complete with the full academic apparatus of footnotes and \'original\' images from X’s life, it is consistently playful and inventive. Even if some of its targets are low-hanging fruit, and the satire is a little blunt, we get the sense of a writer hitting a rich seam and mining it for all it’s worth.
Isabel Waidner
Positive The Guardian (UK) A seditious headrush of a book; a fresh and provocative act of resistance to our morally slippery times. It’s endlessly associative, bursting with ribaldry and Tory-baiting satire ... an effervescent, supra-subversive adventure, held together (just) by a tenuous dream logic that is constantly surprising and delicious in its humour ... If the antic energy feels occasionally overheated, Waidner demonstrates they can effortlessly change gear, wrongfooting the reader with the starkly serious ... While Sterling Karat Gold’s imaginative afflatus is as confidently sustained as its predecessor, it adds an extra layer of satirical bite with its shocking ending.
Paddy Crewe
Rave The Guardian Paddy Crewe’s ambitious, cinematic debut novel set during Georgia’s gold rush in a semi-mythic American south that recalls both Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Faulkner’s Light in August...Purporting to be the written account of Yip’s adventures narrated from the comfort of later life, it explores a society in flux, one about to turn its back on religion and embrace greed and individualism...It’s also a rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist...My Name Is Yip is a remarkably vivid and energetic debut novel; a consummate linguistic performance made all the more extraordinary by the fact that its author is from Stockton-on-Tees rather than Atlanta, Georgia.
Pankaj Mishra
Rave The Spectator (UK) The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you’d expect. An exploration of Narendra Modi’s autocratic, Hindu-nationalist New India seen through the progress of three graduates from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, it’s also reassuringly rich in characterisation and the sheer sensory overload of modern life ... As an exuberant chronicle of a late capitalist world fatally mediated by Twitter and Instagram, Run and Hide might be the most zeitgeisty novel you could read. By the end, Arun recalls Hermann Hesse’s non-conformist heroes, his searching insight and principles of social equality assailed but still intact.
Renee Branum
Positive The Guardian (UK) Narrated in short, anecdotal chapters, Marta’s first-person account of the twins’ shared life is perceptive and witty ... What this meditative, fragmentary novel lacks in narrative propulsion it makes up for in digressional detail. There’s also much sparkling imagery ... While its obsession with historical correspondences and coincidences can be overly schematic, the book’s single-minded focus on violent death by falling is almost Ballardian in its macabre beauty. Defenestrate is an original and engaging novel from a fresh new voice, one deeply committed to understanding the beguiling experience of twinship, and to writing twins from the inside.
Lisa Harding
Rave The Guardian (UK) Intense and unnerving ... There’s a lot to lament, and even more to rail against, in a novel that becomes a ferocious jeremiad against life’s suffocating forces ... It’s moments of sobering clarity such as this, and their promise of a redemptive ending, that carry the reader through so many harrowing pages of self-evisceration ... Harding’s protagonist is a singular creation: complex, contrary, drily funny in a characteristically Irish fashion. Written with great energy and generosity, Bright Burning Things is the raw and emotional story of a woman’s search for self-knowledge; one that grips from the beginning.
Jessica Anthony
Rave The Guardian (UK) Who would have guessed that a satire about an oily Republican congressman, 19th-century taxidermy and a creature so ugly it resembles \'a pig screwed by a donkey\' would be the perfect tonic for testing times? This is what Jessica Anthony’s insouciant and ingenious novel delivers in fewer than 192 achingly funny pages ... As with any farce, it’s in the distance between a character’s self-conception and their reality that the comedy lies ... Anthony delights in destroying her Reagan-obsessive narrator on the page, while only occasionally allowing the comic situations to veer into the ludicrous or implausible ... Light on its feet, utilising second-person narration to great effect, Enter the Aardvark is reminiscent of Lionel Shriver’s recent sharply cynical novel, The Mandibles, while its trenchant satire echoes Tom Rachman’s much overlooked story collection, Basket of Deplorables, in which the shallow cruelties of Trump’s presidency are eviscerated. Ultimately, though, Anthony’s voice is all her own: deliciously astute, fresh and terminally funny.
Chris Power
Rave The Times Literary Supplement \"...ten richly imagined, superbly controlled stories ... Frequently, Power presents characters displaced from home, in lonely communion with themselves, defined by landscapes in which they feel themselves to be lost ... Restrained yet formally ambitious, these marvellously crafted stories brim with menace and moments of truth.\