PositiveNew StatesmanThis collection is fiercely intelligent, with enviable prose that is at once luminous and precise ... The best essays in the book are the long lyrical ones that take the reader on confident, if circuitous, journeys. The tour-de-force may be the opening piece, \'Driving as Metaphor\'. Psychologically astute as always, Cusk identifies a variety of driving \'types\': the fast driver, the slow driver, the rageful driver, the old driver – and the non-driver ... Less effective are some of the book reviews that Cusk appears to have \'filed away\' here. In her contemplation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love she seems to dole out criticisms that have traditionally been applied to her own work (eg \'egotism\'), and thus an unkindness is perpetuated ... Coventry may have been a more cohesive work if it had contained only first-person essays – or perhaps, at the other extreme, it could have edged more forcefully towards eccentricity and hybridity, reflecting Cusk’s deconstructionist approaches to form and self.
Kristen Roupenian
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement\"... sharp, powerful and uncomfortable ... This manoeuvre, which one might call empathy-shifting, is deployed by Roupenian often and elegantly throughout the collection ... In fact the tales often display an intriguing fluidity of genre. Stories that begin in a hyperreal vein can end up shading into fantasy. The real and the surreal co-exist; so too fairy-tale and horror. Roupenian’s clear, fluent, unintrusive prose is a sturdy foundation for flux and intricacy. We don’t feel yanked from mode to mode. She is always in narrative control.\
