PositiveThe Guardian (UK)The book ends not with triumph, but on a note of exhaustion and resignation. It is this that gives Change its lasting power: the realisation that a hero’s journey only makes sense if the hero has a home to return to, and while a person might be capable of receiving love ... Louis is a divisive writer, and Change will ensure he remains so. It will be too didactic for some, closer to the polemic than the poetic. For others, his political insight will not go far enough, veering as it occasionally does towards the paternalistic. For this reader, however, it has simply served as a reminder of how lucky we are to have him, a writer who relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few.
Colin Barrett
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch ... With Barrett it is all precision and precious little release. His is the type of brilliance that can occasionally veer into the territory of the virtuosic, the relentless and the clinical. When working in the short-story form, this is an unalloyed asset, but across the course of a whole novel, it can begin to feel a little airless ... What ultimately prevents this from dragging the novel down is Barrett’s handling of dialogue, which is so consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison.
Megan Nolan
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A considerably more interesting book than it claims to be ... The overall effect is claustrophobic and relentlessly melancholic, but that is not to say that the novel is one-note. It is testament to Nolan’s ability as a writer that she is able to wring so much nuance and power out of an emotional palette consisting mostly of greys and blues. Ordinary Human Failings is an achievement of shade and texture ... Deeply tender.
Michael Magee
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Taut and impressive ... If all of that sounds heavy, it’s because it is. There is no light relief here. Close to Home is a book of premature tiredness, emotional repression and the halting and heavy-handed ways we might try to love one another regardless. The novel is relatively short on plot...but remains gripping due to its unfaltering and deftly executed commitment to psychological empathy. Magee writes tenderness with serious skill ... There are occasional missteps. The first few chapters are littered with the type of self-correcting prose...that so often characterises a writer in the process of finding their feet. And elsewhere, Magee sometimes reaches for slightly obvious gestures of sociocultural standing ... But these are niggles, and do little to diminish the overall effect of what is ultimately a staggeringly humane and tender evocation of class, violence and the challenge of belonging in a world that seems designed to keep you watching from the sidelines.
