RaveThe Telegraph (UK)\"To read Tremor is to engage with these questions, and be greeted by a swathe of astonishing images, formal ingenuity and raw, metamorphic emotion ... The plot is light-touch, but intentionally and successfully so. As readers, we focus less on linearity – on a series of events linked to a single protagonist – and instead move freely through time and space, floating between USA and Nigeria, between first-, third- and second-person voices, between memories and shared biographies ... Yet Tremor is not, as the previous paragraphs might suggest, unstructured. Throughout, violence is an anchor, maybe even the real protagonist. It has been a common theme across Cole’s oeuvre: his final column at The New York Times was titled \'When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)\' Here, it returns again and again, as murder, as infidelity, as an earthquake, as an illness ... Cole is not just offering us a novel about art, migration, or marginalisation, rather a new politics of seeing, reading and thinking: of interpreting our time on Earth while our notions of empathy are expanded or torn apart completely.\
Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)\"The authors hit all the expected sci-fi notes – an ill-fated experiment expanding into a quantum field of love and loss – but resist the containment of a single genre. Prophet is a page-turner in which object-oriented philosophy sits comfortably alongside military acronyms – and with a handful of familiar horror tropes to boot.\
Seirian Sumner
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... [a] detailed, example-rich study ... Most interesting are the sections celebrating the chemical language of wasps ... The book is, unsurprisingly, a love letter to an \'old\', \'beautiful\' and \'bizarre\' animal – one that surpasses almost all other insects in age, diversity and genealogical abundance. But in creating a rationale for adoration, Sumner has uncovered much deeper questions. How do we decide which creatures to love? What role do aesthetics play in what we deem \'good\' and \'bad\'? ... Seirian Sumner shows us the wider damage of learning from, and protecting, only that which appeals to us. Ultimately we are offered a small but noteworthy antidote: a lesson in practising unbiased appreciation, beyond the metrics of our own value systems.
