PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Engrossing ... Has some curious blind spots; it’s odd, in a critique of a technology driven largely by profit-seeking corporations, that capitalism is hardly mentioned at all. But whether or not you agree with Harari’s historical framing of AI, it’s hard not to be impressed by the meticulous way he builds it up ... Operates primarily as a diagnosis and a call to action, and on those terms it’s broadly successful.
Willy Vlautin
RaveThe Observer (UK)It sounds bleak, and it is, but The Horse, weighing in at little more than 200 pages, is also lithe and, for all its jumping around in time, tremendously compelling. Vlautin’s characters are briskly sketched, with the risk that all the ex-bandmates and former lovers begin to blur together, but the dialogue is sturdy and the milieu in which Ward’s career unfolds... is richly conjured.
Adam Higginbotham
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Higginbotham has to work doubly hard to make it all comprehensible ... The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters ... May lack the feverish radioactive pulse and vast dramatic scope of Midnight in Chernobyl, but once it gets over the initial hurdles it’s still one hell of a ride.
Ferdia Lennon
RaveThe Observer (UK)Immensely likeable ... Lennon stops well short of suggesting that stories have the power to heal the world, but – just sometimes – they can make a difference to individual lives.
Elaine Feeney
PositiveThe Observer (UK)Her writing is strongest when she takes us inside Jamie’s head ... It is to Feeney’s credit that Jamie never fully buys into these notions to sentimental effect. But the tides of the novel carry him elsewhere, towards a reunion of sorts with his mother, and on the way Jamie learns to cede control, for a short while at least, and go with the flow.
Benjamin Labatut
RaveThe Observer (UK)Darkly fascinating ... Riveting ... Labatut handles all of this with impressive dexterity, unpicking complex ideas in long, elegant sentences that propel us forward at speed (this is his first book written in English). Even in the more feverish passages, when yet another great mind succumbs to madness, haunted by the spectres they’ve helped unleash on the world, he feels in full control of his material.
David Grann
RaveThe Observer (UK)Grann, who spent five-plus years working on the book, is expert at stitching together the available facts so deftly that we hardly notice the gaps. He draws on other contemporary seafaring accounts to round out the narrative and splices in his own atmospheric descriptions of quaking seas and creaking hulls ... Provides a valuable corrective, then, but not at the expense of a cracking yarn, with no shortage of jeopardy to bedevil its characters. Grann’s taste for desperate predicaments finds its fullest expression here, and it’s hard to think of a better author to steer us through the extremes.
Amit Chaudhuri
MixedThe Observer (UK)This disorientation is present from the outset and in the opening pages it threatens to derail Chaudhuri’s usually sure-footed prose. Faqrul’s arrival at the narrator’s talk provokes a flurry of similes, none of which quite land as they ought to...Is this a reflection of the narrator’s shaky mental state or just subpar writing? ... No matter. The prose soon regains its footing and as the narrator meanders around Berlin, visiting department stores, museums and an old-style dancehall, the novel weaves its befuddling spell ... We’re left with an impression of a man untethered in reality, but also of a world drained of significance, of consequence, of strong feelings or at least their outward expression.
Ed Yong
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... magnificent ... Yong has a knack for vivid similes ... might be his most audacious undertaking so far ... We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom, but when it comes to understanding what it’s like to be a songbird using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate across continents, we barely know where to start. Yong is up for giving it his best shot, not least because he understands how damaging it can be to disregard other creatures’ perspectives ... The book is so full of these little astonishments, beautifully rendered, that Yong occasionally risks overwhelming our sense of wonder ... But it’s the attempt that matters, and Yong succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on these alien worlds – worlds that drift around us every day, like plankton around a scallop, but whose richness and extravagant strangeness we rarely pause to examine. Now, thanks to this book, we have scenes to help us see.
