About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Madison Newbound
Positive The Times Literary Supplement It does not make for pleasurable reading to be kept inside the egocentric but lobotomized experience of heartbreak, with its keynotes of hollowness and despair. It thus comes as a relief when Newbound introduces Elsa’s rebound ... Madison Newbound refuses her protagonist any obvious routes to happiness. What she offers Elsa, at last, has far greater worth: a reminder that what we ought to find in relationships, any kind of relationship, is something like mutual understanding, like recognition.
Leslie Jamison
Mixed The Telegraph (UK) \"\'Get specific,\' Jamison tells her students, so often that she eventually has the maxim iced on a cake for them to better take it in. Yet in Splinters, each thought is so gilded with specific detail that her sentences plummet under the weight of the metal ... most successful when the writing asks what it means to bring up a child with someone you no longer love, whom you no longer even see ... But what Jamison most wants to do in Splinters is alchemize banality into profundity...It would have made Splinters a better book had Jamison aimed for normality: the miraculous normality of falling in love and that love coming to an end, the miraculous normality of raising a child and seeing who they become.\
Sheena Patel
Rave The Guardian (UK) Corrosive, brilliant ... It would be a disservice to call I’m a Fan a social-media novel, because the plot is so much more ramified and vital than the cold flat surface of a screen would allow for ... What makes I’m a Fan so successful is the protagonist’s ability to interpret and critique the toxicity of these structures even as she is caught inside them.
Max Porter
Mixed Times Literary Supplement (UK) With its polyphonic, poetic style – full of portmanteaus, mimetic and onomatopoeic trills...Shy is everything we have come to expect from Porter’s aesthetic ... The intrusions in Shy feel bitty, distracting, hanging empty above the narrative like plastic bags in trees. It might have been braver to do away with these distracting voices altogether, to risk staying wholeheartedly in the mind of a lost and enraged young man. For Shy is the most nuanced, life-like character Max Porter has created yet, with more edge and substance than his predecessors. It feels a shame not to know him better.
Sarah Gilmartin
Mixed Times Literary Supplement (UK) Kate is a gentle, empathetic character, the contours of her interior life delicately navigated by Gilmartin in the close third person. And it is through Kate’s sensitivity that the other family members are prevented from becoming the stock portraits they might otherwise have been ... But these nuances of character are not a strong enough adhesive to hold the novel together. Each distinct time period is explored in a single, long chapter, and separate chapters are devoted to the several dinner parties commemorating Elaine’s death, to Kate’s life at university, to her relationship with a married man. And, rather than functioning like separate gears all working together, each of the chapters feels isolated, inert.
Daisy LaFarge
Rave The Guardian (UK) Lafarge introduces early on in the text the concept of geomagnetic reversal – a sudden switch in the planet’s magnetic field that takes place \'every half million years or so\', which Paul’s neighbour predicts will occur imminently. The novel sets up a similar magnetic transferral ... A fissure opens up between the narratorial and authorial perspective, between Frances’s awed perception of her host and the grim reality of his character – his inflated pride, his cruelty, the mysterious void at the centre of his life ... Paul has a neat, intuitive structure. There are three discrete sections, each lasting a week ... Its plot is light and fast-moving: Lafarge introduces into the text a multitude of distinctive characters, locations and events ... The novel gains density, though, through mythical allusion, historical parallels and rich, complex imagery ... In this beautifully constructed novel, it is only a matter of time before the truth comes out, the magnetic poles reversing once more.
Thuan
Rave The Times Literary Supplement (UK) There are no paragraph or chapter breaks in Chinatown, except for two ruptures in which the narrator inserts extracts from a short story she is writing, I’m Yellow: a first-person narrative about a man running away from his awful wife and their daughter. These sections are surprising and brilliant: each aspect of the narrator’s story is in them, except turned inside out so as to become something other. The rest of the narrative passes from recollection to recollection, with seamless fluidity ... an astonishing work of sharp wit and profound tragedy that refuses to be flattened into a single representation.
Polly Barton
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) Barton’s centring of doubt in her narrative – doubt about her linguistic skills; doubt about her relationships with people she meets, and with the country itself – brings nuance to her account of learning a language outside the classroom. It is doubt that eventually makes her a successful Japanese translator.
Sara Freeman
Mixed The Guardian (UK) The experience of reading such a novel is like travelling through a series of expertly designed studio flats. You marvel at every interior you come to: a whole unto itself, not a foot wrong in the design. But then you turn the page and enter yet another four walls, the last beginning to fade from your mind. Only at the end are you able to conceive of all these paragraphs at once, imagine a whole tower block of crafted text ... Freeman’s chosen form, then, acts as a visual manifestation of her protagonist’s state: her refusal of proximity, her abnegation of all those people and places that had previously been contiguous to her life ... This mirroring of structure and plot is smart. It can be very effective. But it also feels too artificial, too neat, to the extent that it draws attention away from the plot and towards its own ingenuity. It is an example of American literary critic and poet Yvor Winters’s \'fallacy of imitative form\', his attack on modernist poetry wherein the \'form succumbs to the raw material of the poem\', weakening both the poem’s ability to convey its meaning and the form itself ... Freeman hammers her paragraphs down into perfected, indivisible units, without any bulk or extraneous matter. When it works, her images are light as gas...but when it becomes the only thought on a page, without other images to jostle against, it loses its vitality ... In Tides, the splitting of paragraphs between pages does not become more than a formal pretension, one that slows down and makes less coherent an otherwise very strange and poignant novel.
Claire Keegan
Positive The Guardian (UK) The narrative gains its emotional resonance from the dynamics between characters ... Plunge pool-like, the narrative implies significant depth below its close, bounded surface ... Keegan pushes the violence back into the margins. The awful things that disturb her characters’ lives are only hinted at, having transpired some time before the present, or in the previous generation. It makes the stories more substantial and elemental ... Keegan provides [Bill] with a complex, nuanced inner life ... Why, then, does Small Things Like These not feel quite as devastating, as lasting, as Keegan’s previous work? Perhaps, for the first time in her writing, the lightness here has become too light – is kept too far away from the darkness that lurks at the other side of the town.
Robin McLean
Mixed Times Literary Supplement (UK) [A] carnival of a novel, which seeks to present – and conceal – tragedy in a farrago of competing styles and registers ... Some of these strands are brilliant in their weirdness...others fall flat ... One explanation for McLean’s choice of such disparate modes is that she requires a disorientating, playful amalgam of styles to accommodate the unrelenting atrocities being carried out, both against her protagonist and the wider cast of characters, man and beast alike. Form mirrors content ... Pity the Beast occasionally reaches a McCarthyian pitch of incantatory power ... At times, however, Mclean’s style falters.
Tao Lin
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books With its emphasis on the partnership model of gender relations, Leave Society often reads as a veiled attempt to redress Lin’s past failures, particularly his abuses of power, in relationships ... As part of his efforts at self-betterment, Li tries to mediate between his parents, as well as improve his own relations with them ... These scenes are elegantly structured, with Li’s meditations guiding the reader through the delicately shifting dynamics among the three of them, like a particularly sensitive weathervane ... While the language in Leave Society remains stark in places—Lin’s descriptive skills are greatly inferior to his ability to capture mood and generate humor through dialogue—there is a subtlety to his observations that feels like a progression ... To develop one’s style so extensively, and with such success, over four books is no mean feat, a testament to Lin’s fastidious editing process. Many of the ideas offered up in Leave Society are murky, bordering on conspiracy theory ... What is interesting in Leave Society, however, is not the truth or falsity of its arguments—this is marketed as a work of fiction, after all—but how such arguments inflect character ... The final sentence of Leave Society [is] “Li took a leaf\' ... On my first reading of Leave Society, I did not know what, if anything, to make of the homophone \'leaf\' and \'leave.\' On the second reading, when I was better accustomed to Lin’s humor and his delight in multiplicity, it seemed to me both metaphorical and literal, playful and quite serious, a brilliant, almost perfect ending.
Paul Kingsnorth
Mixed The Times Literary Supplement (UK) The cantos...are neither sufficiently coherent nor sufficiently substantial to give the reader a clear understanding of the timeline that precedes the narrative; nor are they significantly mystical or stylistically interesting enough to excuse such opacity ... The imagery the characters deploy is thin and narrow, their emotional range limited. They speak only with absolute, terrible sincerity ... Reading the first half of Alexandria is like finding oneself in a half-furnished house, the rooms mostly cleaned out, a bleakness and incompleteness pervading everything. But then, 179 pages in, a new voice enters the text and transforms Alexandria into a far more interesting novel than it sets itself up to be ... Kingsnorth holds both lines of argument in a delicate balance—that man is the destroyer of Earth and AI brought restitution to the natural world by ethically removing humans from it; and that Wayland’s creation of Alexandria is the story’s true destructive force, its emergence functioning as an act of war against mankind. The dexterity with which Kingsnorth shifts between these two perspectives prevents Alexandria from becoming lumped together with other trope-ridden, science fiction narratives of heroic man versus the evil machine.
Chris Power
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) A Lonely Man pose significant ethical questions: when does artistic borrowing cross over to become artistic theft, and what, if anything, do you owe to the person from whom you borrow? ... This balancing act is expertly handled; both styles are refreshed and made strange by their contact with the other. In perhaps the strongest section of the book, the Patrick narrative is temporarily shelved. Power unsettlingly resurfaces the theme of false memories, and the narratives we construct for ourselves from the truth.
Anakana Schofield
Rave The Times Literary Supplement (UK) The slow disclosure of plot, at first frustrating, becomes one of the greatest pleasures of this excellent book. Painted with colour and wit, there emerges a whole host of absurdist characters clamouring for Bina’s attention ... The emotional core of the novel, however, is Bina’s relationship with her dear friend Phil, who, we are reminded in the footnotes, is the protagonist of Schofield’s first book, Malarkey (2012). Their friendship is beautifully realized on the page, providing a life-raft both for Bina and the reader in the face of so much cruelty ... These moments of vivid, metaphorical description are all the more striking in contrast to the brusque, contracted language otherwise deployed in Bina’s tale ... In writing her life as it happened, Bina is invested with the kind of power she has not been granted beyond the page. Such power does not extend to delivering herself the ending she has hoped for. Instead, we are given a beautiful, devastating tale about the tragedy of old age.
Diane Cook
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) It is the anthropological acuity in Cook’s writing that makes it so persuasive. She explores how our nature is informed by the land we inhabit, how our conception of civility is relative to the circumstances in which we find ourselves ... expertly plotted ... Such foregrounding of action does, at times, reduce the opportunity for nuanced character development ... The chief power of The New Wilderness, and what distinguishes it from less successful environmental dystopian fiction, is Cook’s talent for world-building. The Wilderness State’s topography is deftly rendered, based on field research Cook conducted in eastern Oregon ... In these moments of respite from the ever-turning gears of plot, the writing is highly seductive.