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Recent Reviews
Julia Armfield
Rave The Guardian (UK) So compelling partly because both the narrator and the protagonists feel intensely drawn to this watery world, even as they know it signals their end ... Armfield is always committed to experiments with genre and here she rips away realism, suggesting the old novelistic forms are as inadequate now as the half‑hearted forms of political protest that take place in the background.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Rave The Guardian (UK) With breathtaking confidence, Knausgård mirrors The Morning Star, giving us other, richer perspectives on the material ... Transcendent ... In interviews, Knausgård exhibits a heady mixture of grandiosity and humility, and the two come together here revealingly. The book, with its disquisitions on death and eternity, is extremely grandiose ... Thinking it was a finale, I found it magisterial. There is both sufficient resolution, brought by the feeling of endlessly proliferating perspectives, and sufficient ambiguity. As a midpoint in a longer work, I find it less promising, though it makes sense that Knausgård wants to undercut any sense of resolution.
Katherine Bucknell
Positive The Guardian (UK) Bucknell is right to put his psychology at the heart of his work ... I’m still unsure if we need another expansive portrait of Isherwood. Bucknell’s research is deeply impressive and her judgments astute, but there are so many minor characters and small shifts of allegiance that it’s hard to keep track of the larger arguments. For the generations less familiar with him, a biography of this kind isn’t the best way to bring the work alive.
Sarah Manguso
Positive The Guardian (UK) Manguso is a master of the searing aphoristic insight ... Liars is a compulsive, claustrophobic book to read, but it’s also curiously thin, starved of oxygen in the way that Jane herself is. The years, as they amass, are necessarily repetitive ... There’s a sense in the final stages that Manguso is pulling away from herself as an aphorist, and pushing towards a richer, wider mimetic vision.
Miranda July
Rave The Guardian (UK) \"...acerbically clever, radically compassionate ... July’s characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty, including with Harris ... By tangling explicitly with reality across mediums she pushes autofiction to new limits, revealing how good this genre is at questioning reality. How can the narrator make her own peculiarities part of a lived life? How can she get real in the face of death if what remains most real is art?\
Maggie Nelson
Rave The Guardian (UK) The writing isn’t consistent, any more than her books are. But I like to take my thinkers and writers whole, as she does. The essays offer a kind of composite self-portrait, and illustrate how she thinks, sometimes painstakingly, sometimes with casual jubilance, about some of the central dilemmas of our time.
Louisa Hall
Rave The Guardian (UK) Brainily visceral ... The book’s triumph is to reveal, brilliantly and with feeling, the uncanny peculiarity of pregnancy and childbirth, and to connect this to all that is unnatural and peculiar about our overheating planet, with pollution and global warming throwing hormones awry and overheating pregnant bodies. It’s the tussle with Frankenstein that reveals how high the stakes are.
Brandon Taylor
Positive The Guardian (UK) The stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels ... A more ambitious, nimbly diffuse novel, moving between a large cast of characters, mainly gay graduate students of dance or creative writing. The campus setting enables the creation of basically similar people who define themselves by difference ... Baggier than Cusk’s Outline and baggier than Taylor’s own Real Life. It’s a less entirely resolved read than either of them, but for me, this book assures and deepens Taylor’s position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Positive The Guardian (UK) Sally doesn’t manage to write the great romcom of her dreams – maybe because she’s too busy living one. Does Sittenfeld? Alas, in the end, not quite. There’s so much to applaud here. Sittenfeld is such a witty writer, so the banter and sketches are funny enough to feel as though we really are in the company of America’s funniest sketch writers. It’s a moving and compulsive novel ... But there’s a tidiness that risks becoming slightness in Sittenfeld’s novel. It may be that not enough goes wrong ... Despite this, at its most expansive, Sittenfeld’s novel continues her wider project of exploring the possibility for a kind of redemptive idealism within our flawed world.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Positive The Guardian (UK) Bold and original ... The book is written with an urgent sense of needing to speak right up to the present, yet its stories end in 1928. There is a danger of fetishisation here. Are 1920s Paris and Sussex still our best hope of liberation, and are we doomed if they are? Schwartz, for me, doesn’t quite face this question. But if I’ve quoted a lot from the novel in this review, it’s because the prose is so compelling. After Sappho is a book that’s wholly seduced by seduction and that seduces in turn. And that’s partly because the sentences, crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism, feel so easily, casually of our time ... In the Sappho-Cassandra dialectic Schwartz brings something new and necessary to the dance across time, and it’s a dialectic in which our embodied lives are central.
Tom Crewe
Rave The Guardian (UK) Crewe’s virtuoso debut The New Life is one of the most embodied historical novels I have read ... Crewe’s brilliance – in addition to his ability to make us feel the physical sensations – is in dramatising moral dilemmas with complexity and rigour. He’s especially good at exploring the perennial conflict between private and public acts of courage and openness.
Katherine Rundell
Rave The Guardian (UK) Rundell is right that Donne...must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called \'felt thought\', his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract ... It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before ... Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on ... This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an \'infinity merchant\' ... To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness
Antonia Fraser
Positive The Guardian (UK) Fraser gives insightful judgment on the questions that remain questions despite Caroline’s extensive archive ... Fraser’s is a spirited book, particularly moving on Norton’s old age. It is impressive to see one of our most important intellectual figures turning her mind to this remarkable woman from an earlier, different and not so different era. I would recommend Diane Atkinson’s longer, 2012 biography for anyone who wants to get to know Norton and her campaigns in detail. Both writers are sensitive readers of her own writing, and are judicious in the face of her frequent assertions of male superiority ... Fraser seems on the whole to think that the feminists have now succeeded, but I’m inclined to agree with Atkinson’s suggestion that it’s a story that reveals that not enough has changed.
Kyung-Sook Shin, trans. by Anton Hur
Positive The Guardian (UK) Violets is a novel built on the proximity of beauty and violence ... We don’t see any large-scale social unrest; instead Shin finds indirect and nuanced ways to conjure the atmosphere of a place where flourishing is thwarted at every turn ... [There are] several moments when the narrative voice takes over, appearing to have more power and agency than the characters ... The all-knowing narrator can feel a little arch, but at its best, there’s a timeless, fable-like quality to the narration that makes the story strange and gripping. Because the narrator is so powerful, San herself seems to have terrifyingly little control over her destiny from moment to moment – itself a feeling presented as universal at this time in Seoul. Shin has an intense feeling for place, and an ability to bring it alive not as mere setting but as intensely felt imaginative terrain.
Gavin McCrea
Rave The Guardian (UK) Here the voices are quieter, but McCrea creates a pungent idiom for Jiang that gives forceful life to her character ... Essentially, McCrea’s new book is a capacious work of social realism – appropriately enough, given its curiosity about the art produced in the final stages of communism. It is full-throated in its evocation of London in the 60s, but also attentive to psychological states ... [A] brilliant, psychedelic climax ... The strength of...these novels about moments of communist history is that he makes the visionaries he describes so wholly human ... McCrea evidently finds the communist vision compelling. This is partly because it yields such rewarding narrative materials, but what makes these novels really interesting is his underlying sympathy with the substance of the vision. He uses his feel for novelistic psychology and family dynamics to breathe rich life into the communist project ... [A] dazzlingly ambitious yet modestly human novel.
Sarah Hall
Rave The Guardian (UK) What’s fascinating here...are Hall’s revelations about illness and its relationship to creativity and to sexuality ... Hall has always written sex well and seriously, has always allowed desire to effloresce even in the most unlikely situations, but now she makes sex the heart of the book, describing it lyrically ... The scenes where the feverish man and the exhausted woman come together in their infected bed have an extraordinary erotic intensity; it is there also in the brutally visceral descriptions of his final decline ... This terrible, ambivalent closeness takes all of Hall’s magnificent powers as a novelist to describe. I was left feeling that only she could write it. Just as powerful are her awed descriptions of the virus itself ... The hope in this sparse, sumptuous, brilliant book is that the work of finding meaning and truth can be continued even in extremity, even as art and love slip away.
Simone De Beauvoir, Tr. Sandra Smith
Rave The New Republic It\'s a book that unfolds through a series of intense, intimate scenes, saturated by the sensory world of childhood ... vividly evoked ... It\'s as though Beauvoir had to find a form that allowed her readers, too, to have this experience of profound, ingenuous readerly identification. As in Elena Ferrante\'s novels, adolescence is honored on its own terms—we can feel how devastating it is for Sylvie when she feels let down or unseen ... There\'s a defenselessness to Sylvie\'s pain, a preparedness to write openly about excruciating adolescent embarrassment, that Beauvoir couldn\'t allow herself in the more staidly retrospective memoirs ... so quietly realistic, so full of curiosity and open to the future ... Beauvoir\'s talent here was for full-blooded description of young women lurching between poised intelligence, wistful godly leanings and coquettish charm ... There\'s a fresh kind of writing present in the novel—a spontaneous, ecstatic side of Beauvoir that was reined in by the more dutiful side of her existentialism ... Sandra Smith has more than done the novel justice in her stylish and readable translation.
Maggie Nelson
Positive The Guardian (UK) It’s probably appropriate, in a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, that the conclusions should be at once so adventurous and so unexpectedly old fashioned ... tremendously energising ... Nelson isn’t interested in engaging with historical thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who staked their lives on how to avoid one person’s freedom resulting in another’s captivity, but she engages deeply with these questions herself ... Nelson’s book is written as part of a conversation with friends and mentors. She has a gift for bringing on to the page serious intellectual debates that are full of personalities figuring out what to do with their lives. She’s less interested in defining freedom for subsequent generations than making an urgent intervention. This is invigorating because she opens the conversation to her readers as fellow interlocutors – she describes it as \'thinking aloud with others\' – in an astonishingly moving way ... The climate section was for me the least satisfying, perhaps because we have less freedom to diverge in our opinions here. The unsatisfactoriness is probably fitting as a way to experience our present impasse – arguably we need to embrace intellectual limits as well as material ones, buckling down behind an orthodoxy. But somehow also the lack of interest in wider intellectual traditions that characterises the book gave the writing a thinness here. There’s a kind of magpie delight to Nelson – she quotes without giving writers their own contexts. It feels strange to have Foucault given centre stage without some sense of his complex, shifting intellectual background or without a sense of Nietzsche and Pierre Hadot behind him. It feels strange, too, for the perspectives she brings to bear to be so broadly the perspectives of liberal humanism (indeterminacy, subjectivity, ambivalence) but for the book to claim so determinedly that the needs, desires and trajectories of the liberal humanist subject are no longer available to us ... Arguably, this is a central dilemma of our age. And arguably, what makes this book so exciting is precisely the balancing act that enables Nelson to tear everything up at the same time as she retains faith in the values (desire, artistic freedom, difficulty) that shaped her. Reading it, I had a visceral experience of seeing how this can be done in good faith, how we can think as Nelson does about sex and art while also believing in the necessity for a new order ... We have to hope this book will act as a call to thought, allowing other writers to return to freedom with all its messiness and difficulty, ushering in a collective conversation about the genealogy of freedom and the future of the liberal humanist subject, helping us to find out what to do with these times that may turn out to be good after all.
Frances Wilson
Rave The New Republic Wilson approaches Lawrence with the fierce spirit of argument that he has always attracted and required ... she’s battling her way into the fray, taking a pleasurably Lawrentian all-or-nothing attitude ... This is a bold, fervent contribution to Lawrence studies, full of spirit and insight and enviably agile prose. It’s a fitting response to Lawrence’s embattledness, which arguably necessitates extreme investment and speculative volatility. It’s impossible to do him justice, so it’s better to go for a high-energy caper instead. One result of this is that Wilson propels herself into some loopy judgments ... Perhaps because of the bold imaginative creativity of this vision, Wilson’s more minor judgments are often both original and spot on ... Wilson is great at deft character sketches ... an enthralling and eccentric friend of a book (it’s appropriate that Lawrence’s friendships were as out of control as they were energizing), much more fun as a read than traditional biographies with more measured judgments. Compared with so many other versions of Lawrence, Wilson’s book offers rich ambivalence toward its subject, in place of a stark binary. It may be all to the good if neither Lawrence nor his biographers have the sense for health or the sanity that Leavis promised us.
Fiona Mozley
Rave The Guardian (UK) There’s a dazzling panning shot at the start where she introduces us to almost all the major characters without pausing for breath ... Like Dickens or Balzac, Mozley is interested in breathing life into cliches, using two-dimensionality to gain breadth and social reach. Mozley has a background as a medievalist academic and her ease with typologies, with tavern life, and indeed with bawdy good-heartedness, may owe something to that period ... Mozley’s achievement is to create room for ambivalence and nuance, even when the book’s world is drawn with such cartoonish vigour. Are the police right to want to crack down so vehemently on sex trafficking that they end up destroying the lives of prostitutes? Are the prostitutes right to mock the feminists who urge them to protect their bodies from men? ... In an age when so many novelists of Mozley’s generation take refuge in the dystopian, she has reinvigorated large-scale social realism for our times.
Megan Nolan
Positive The Guardian (UK) There is so much to admire in this extremely impressive first novel, which captures an intense experience with clarity and style. It is fully itself, and flawless in its way. I also found it claustrophobic, and airless. This is obviously the point...These are scenes that Nolan evokes powerfully. But there’s more to the airlessness than the narrator’s claustrophobia. I found, as a reader, that there was also an airlessness in the moral vision ... the book never seems prepared to leave its contradictions open ... If the book feels airless then it’s partly because the narrator is being didactic, and doesn’t allow for the women who aren’t victims, the women who have negotiated the patriarchy in different ways, or the women whose victimhood is more genuinely inherent and tragically inevitable. There is so little world here, beyond the lovers. Even the diversity of voice introduced by the two time periods doesn’t let much air in, because there hasn’t been enough growth to allow amplitude, so the later sections tend to magnify the egocentrism with extra moralising ... Nolan is being billed by her publishers, as Sally Rooney was by hers, as the voice of a generation. But she doesn’t leave her generation much room for uncertainty. And some of the tropes defining young women in today’s literary fiction are beginning to feel slightly repetitious and constrained. It may well be that this is because young women’s lives really are repetitious and constrained, and defined by over-determined ideas of victimhood. It’s not that Nolan is wrong about victimhood, or the sources of oppression. It’s that she’s right in a way that doesn’t allow much room for novelistic transformation ... Yet there is plenty to celebrate here. For me the book’s much-needed bursts of oxygen came from the beautifully portrayed relationship between the narrator and her father.
Danielle McLaughlin
Rave The Guardian (UK) In the wrong hands, this book could feel overdetermined ... McLaughlin’s writing is so dry and understated, though, that there’s a sense, even while the tightly packed plot neatly unpacks itself, that these are haphazard incidents in an unfurling life ... The strength of the book lies in its slow-building picture of the way that intimacy and estrangement can coincide ... Through her acute and thoughtful take on issues of truth-telling, McLaughlin reminds us that the novel remains a good mode to investigate our relationship to truth, in part because as a made-up form it remains flexible in its idea of truth ... Being and seeming are both put brilliantly in question in this moving and quietly uplifting book.
Ben Macintyre
Mixed The Guardian (UK) It’s an appealing story, well suited to Ben Macintyre, the popular author of fast-paced books about mid-century spies ... Reading this book, I could see the film it will become. His is a genre well-suited to the excitement of the story but it’s ultimately too focused on the individual to address the moral travails of the 20th century satisfyingly. Because he’s gone for cinematic speed, Macintyre doesn’t always pause to ask questions. Most importantly, why was she so fervently committed and why did she keep going for so long? ... Along the way, Agent Sonya is fascinating as a window on to a set of convictions relatively common at this time among communists.
Catherine Cho
Rave The Guardian (UK) Inferno is a brilliantly frightening memoir about Cho’s two weeks on the psychiatric ward, elegantly interwoven with tales from her past ... Insights of this kind are rarely explicit. Cho’s language is poetically associative and points are made through suggestive juxtaposition. Fragmentary structures can feel merely fashionable, but here it feels hard won ... one of the book’s most compelling suggestions is that even ordinary motherhood resembles psychosis ... among the book’s strengths is its bravery in admitting that the \'fierce, possessive affection\' she feels for her baby is very different from the kind of in‑love feeling she expected.
Elena Ferrante
Rave The Guardian (UK) Elena Ferrante is so good on the bodily feelings of female adolescence: the sweaty, clotted skin, the sudden bulges as breasts form, the awkwardly exciting transformations. She is good, also, on the way that childhood friendships change, becoming infused with desire and longing ... For Ferrante’s loyal readers there’s a pleasure in connecting this bogeyman to the luridly frightening Don Achille in My Brilliant Friend, in connecting Vittoria’s dangerous intelligence with Lila’s, and comparing the symbolic bracelet to the silver bracelet that Lenù breaks there. What’s remarkable is that the book manages to be all the more new and surprising for being layered with familiar Ferrante places and themes. It combines the slow-motion intensity of The Lost Daughter with the addictive momentum of the quartet, rendered in perfectly weighted prose by Ann Goldstein. As with Hardy’s Wessex or DH Lawrence’s Eastwood, the setting, by becoming so familiar, becomes a shared space between reader and writer. It feels as though Ferrante is playing with her fame, inviting us back into the poorer neighbourhoods of Naples that at the start of the book are more familiar to us than they are to Giovanna.
Pauline Delabroy-Allard, Trans. by Adriana Hunter
Mixed The Guardian (UK) ... titillating with its frank descriptions of sex and erotic paeans to the female body...and captivating with its investigation of the suffering involved in passion. It’s a brief, intense read. There is no world beyond the physiological experiences of the lovers. We see into the narrator’s mind only when she is experiencing the effects of desire, or falling apart in its wake. Other characters—the lovers’ parents, the narrator’s daughter—appear but are not given a chance to exist. Much about the tone of the novel reminded me of Leïla Slimani’s work. As with Slimani, there’s a combination of breathless excitement and flatness: as though Samuel Richardson has been crossed with Albert Camus. In both cases there is something compulsive about the reading experience, partly just because the feverish rhythms carry us along ... There’s an arbitrariness in the [relationship\'s] destructiveness that makes it unconvincing ... It could be argued that the arbitrary nature of both passion and destructiveness is precisely what the novel is about. It’s partly an exploration of the solipsism that sex can seem to justify, pushed almost to the point of comedy in a book that still manages to remain humourless ... The best parts of the book are where the narrator goes deeper into inhabiting her own craziness in Sarah’s absence ... It’s as though Delabroy-Allard fully accepts here that she has given up on the social novel altogether, and moves instead into a form of travel writing that ends up being more alluring and disturbing than the sex scenes. I found the \'glimmering gold, blindingly beautiful\' Adriatic the perfect backdrop for the narrator’s decline, if only because the dreamlike setting stopped me minding how wilfully unconvincing the characterisation is beneath the seductive prose.
Sinéad Gleeson
Positive The Guardian (UK) Alongside the essays on blood and ghosts there are pieces on hair, love, loss, motherhood, abortion and hospitals. Collectively, they give us a sketch of Gleeson’s life, while never claiming the definitiveness of an autobiography. What’s offered is something elliptical and fragmentary ... Pain...reverberates through the book ... [Gleeson] is particularly concerned with finding language that can describe illness at its most subjective ... Gleeson is an eloquent storyteller, and the stories are held in delicate balance with the analysis of her world ... Gleeson takes her form as far as it can go in addressing the complexities of her life and times, but there have been moments while reading all the recent essay-collection memoirs when I’ve missed the grittiness and expansiveness of a sustained argument ... Gleeson’s politics feel lighter, in keeping with her more literary form. But...hers is an ongoing project, and part of what’s so pleasing about her book is the sense that it remains unfinished, and open to her readers, as we bring to it our own experiences of sickness and childbirth, sadness and anger, blood and ghosts.
Harry Dodge
Positive The Guardian (UK) These are fascinating thoughts, and there are questions to make us think again on every page. He also has a gift for storytelling, however sparingly used, and the scene where he speaks on the phone with his birth mother is particularly moving. Sometimes the connections between ideas and scenes feel a little tenuous, especially when we’re jumping between very short sections. But throughout there’s a feeling of a singular intelligence, driven by a set of related questions about the relationship between matter and spirit, or empiricism and the occult. I found his thoughts on climate change particularly compelling ... His book is salutary now, partly because he shows us that processes of human connection have always been fraught.
Kate Kirkpatrick
Positive The Guardian (UK) ... I’d have liked to learn more about what De Beauvoir has to tell us today than we are given here. Her complex, ambivalent ideas about gender as both inherent and performed can be usefully brought to bear on the current dilemmas about transsexuality. We can’t ventriloquise De Beauvoir in the present, but it would be worth dwelling with these ideas for longer than Kirkpatrick does. She gives more space to De Beauvoir’s contrary relationship with feminism, and the discussion here is helpfully rich ... There isn’t much material here that’s unknown to scholars, but the letters to Lanzmann do constitute a major new resource ... Where Kirkpatrick’s biography is strongest is in clarifying and showing the strength of De Beauvoir’s ethical commitments, and how these were transformed into political commitments after the war.
Vigdis Hjorth
Positive The Guardian (UK) At its most profound, this is a novel about the way that dysfunctional family life sets one person’s story against another’s with no possibility of victory ... the prose has the convincing feel of a drunken rant, as the sentences circle back on themselves. It’s an ugly book about an ugly subject, lit up only by the black humour of its anecdotes and the freer world of Bergljot’s dreams. Irritating as the repetition can be, it works to enclose us in the claustrophobia of the story, where Bergljot feels doomed to echo herself unheard ... the prose has the convincing feel of a drunken rant, as the sentences circle back on themselves. It’s an ugly book about an ugly subject, lit up only by the black humour of its anecdotes and the freer world of Bergljot’s dreams. Irritating as the repetition can be, it works to enclose us in the claustrophobia of the story, where Bergljot feels doomed to echo herself unheard ... In this unappealing but compelling book, Hjorth proves brilliant at revealing the stubborn, unredemptive quality of childhood suffering.
Benjamin Moser
Positive The Guardian (UK) ...Moser does rather a brilliant job. Over the course of 700 pages, we have Sontag as daughter, friend, lover, wife and mother, but Moser’s writing is appropriately bold and anecdotal, so there is less the feeling of years accrued than of selves tried out. He’s an essayist, taking on an essayist, and his best passages are biographical readings of her writing. His assessment of her novels is punchy and insightful ... He makes good use of the archives, quoting from a revealing selection of unpublished diary entries, letters and essays ... I found Moser less interesting on psychology, and this again may be appropriate, given that Sontag’s friends repeatedly criticised her for her lack of psychological insight. It’s not that Moser isn’t insightful—his judgments usually ring true—more that he doesn’t have the kind of novelistic curiosity some biographers have. Sontag’s son David, and her husband, lovers and friends, don’t emerge as real people. Sontag herself does, to an extent, but Moser has a tendency to diagnose her disorders with the language of a psychology manual ... We need her now, more than ever, and this biography keeps her defiantly alive: argumentative, wilful, often right, always interesting, encouraging us to up our game as we watch her at the top of hers.
Amy Waldman
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...a story about America’s endless war in Afghanistan that layers moving storytelling onto penetrating reportage ... the book is more teeming panoply than intimate portrait. Waldman is particularly gifted at giving tangible reality to ethical dilemmas, so the reader shares Parveen’s bemused sense that there are no correct choices. Waldman is less skilled — perhaps because less interested — at creating three-dimensional characters. The most vibrant is Parveen herself, but Waldman situates her narrative perspective neither quite within Parveen nor at an ironic remove, so that even she never becomes fully alive. Nevertheless, it’s easy to overlook these flaws because the book’s moral questions feel so urgent. Few contemporary authors have shown so expertly that well-intentioned intervention can be the most dangerous kind of all ... A Door in the Earth makes a persuasive case for the novel as a powerful source of insight into our moral limitations. In an age when we’re tempted by Google and social media to believe we know more than we do, that insight is perhaps more valuable than ever.
Karen Olsson
Positive The Guardian Olsson has taken on a complicated mix of subjects. The book is part memoir, part biography and part a general history of 20th-century maths. Its method is aphoristic and digressive: short sections are juxtaposed, sometimes with a kind of cumulative energy and sometimes more randomly. There were times when I longed for something more expansive, for the characters to break out of their small sections. Also I wanted to hear more about the Weils and less (or more intimately) about Olsson, whose own experiences as detailed here are rather less profound than those of her subjects. But this ordinariness does have the advantage of making her an everywoman guide, and what she does brilliantly is to explain the maths clearly and often fascinatingly. Also, and this must be unique among accounts of the Weils, she creates a vivid sense of Simone grappling with the maths alongside us.
Lara Williams
Positive The Guardian The generation described here is millennial, and the voice feels akin to Sally Rooney’s: colloquial, precise, at once uneasy about its place in the world and determined to stand up for itself ... The central theme here is women’s oppression by men, and Williams’s take on it is powerful and original ... The joy of food – its capacity to be so pleasurable that it can subvert niceness – is well described, as is the complexity of cooking. There are some lengthy digressions on the kitchen that maintain enough obsessive verve to be engaging, allowing Williams to take the material of the domestic novel and turn it into something more explosive ... I sometimes found their preoccupations and mental states a little overdeterminedly millennial. All these young women are lost in the world of work, anxious and inadequate; Roberta regularly self-harms. But the point here may be that she and her friends feel trapped by their generation and its stereotypes as well. Certainly the writing becomes most insightful and moving when we sense her pushing against her bounds, while not quite knowing how to do so.
Susan Choi
Rave The Guardian ... is marketed, accurately, as a #MeToo novel, and it shows with painful rawness how much damage can be wrought without anyone realising they are the victim. But this designation doesn’t capture the complexity of Choi’s investigation into human relations. What she’s done, magisterially, is to take the issues raised by #MeToo and show them as inextricable from more universal questions about taking a major role in someone else’s life, while knowing that we’re offering only a minor part in return ... Within these worlds the more intimate scenes have a stark intensity, reminding us how much is at stake in adolescence. The sexual encounters are especially well told, whether they are fulfilling or awkward ... Cumulatively, Choi reminds us that the ultimate trust exercise here is the one performed between her and her reader ... consummate wit, punchiness and feeling, and shows how much we need our female novelists within the sea change of our current moment.
Lyndall Gordon
Positive The New York Times Book Review Gordon is best known for her brilliant studies of Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson. As a biographer, she’s been a visionary herself, mind-reading her way into these figures’ creative processes. She displays the same insight here, reading Frankenstein as Mary Shelley’s effort to confront her estrangement from her father, and suggesting that Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights may have been Emily Brontë’s embodiment of \'Nature itself, red in tooth and claw.\' But this is a slighter book than her previous ones: Its attempts to bring the lives together aren’t sustained, and it can feel as if too much is lost in the brief studies of such well-known names ... Gordon’s voice is most lyrical and assured in her conclusions...I wanted more gems like these, and more on the resonance of these women’s stories today ... Gordon rightly links all five by their shared understanding of death and violence, and as a result her own book is haunted by child mortality ... Gordon narrates their deaths in understated yet powerful detail, stirring some of her most striking observations.
Siri Hustvedt
Rave The Times Literary Supplement This [is] a work of autofiction that uses the capacity of the autofictional both to reveal the layers of construction within the apparent realities of selfhood and to reground fiction in the real ... the affectionate portrait of young people forging lives and personalities in solidarity with each other is movingly done ... philosophical musings combine with the amusing, often rather picaresque action of the 1970s narrative ... The diary sections are written with compelling energy, and bring the young woman easily to life ... a playful, thoughtful book about the workings of memory and the relationship between our older and younger selves...a paean to the pleasures of reading, celebrating the ways that a lifetime with books enhances and complicates selfhood...a work of autofiction that offers truthful fiction to counter an era of fake news. But it is most formidable as a novelistic take on the past fifty years of feminism, told through its parallel snapshots of 1978 and 2016.
Yiyun Li
Positive The Guardian \"As always, Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision ... it feels now as though [Li\'s] whole writing life has been paring down towards this more intimate form. Its compression is hard won, the result both of harrowing lived experience and of moving through realism to something a bit like autofiction, insistent on its integrity. She is no longer creating characters, but giving us their voices in a kind of sustained present, never concealing the fact that we are reading words typed on a page. And her sustained investigation of the relationship between thought and feeling has become the central drama ... It’s moving to hear the narrator, who has sought linguistic precision all her life, placing her faith in the shadows beneath the surface of language.\
Lindsey Hilsum
Positive The Guardian There are times when the book risks becoming a hagiography, but Hilsum avoids this by combining storytelling with asking important questions about what kind of service war correspondents perform and what ethical codes they should adhere to. It becomes clear that the entwined motives to get the best story and to change the world don’t always inspire the same action ... Hilsum tells the story of her final week masterfully in a way that makes the end seem both inevitable and unnecessary.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Positive The Observer (UK) ... feels as though Dangarembga loses confidence in the realist novel, returning to a less developed form, at the same time as Tambu loses confidence in the narratives of progress running through her early life ... a brilliant portrayal of contemporary Harare with its juxtaposition of energetic worldliness and violence ... Because the novel is episodic, it takes us into several of these worlds, most compellingly into the eco-tourism business offering the so-called real ghetto and village experience ... Throughout, a lot of the interest is in the parallel arcs of worldly success and moral worth. These are tellingly disconnected: it’s when Tambu’s fortunes are relatively stable that she performs her most morally shocking act. It’s hard to reconcile morality and survival, especially in a hybrid culture where the moral frameworks of the Shona villages and white society in Harare have not been well aligned. If there is progress amid the book’s structure, then it’s in Tambu’s realisation that she must learn to balance prosperity and kindness.
Katharine Kilalea
Rave The Guardian There’s a void where his personality should be and he turns into a stalker – but somehow the narrator of this strange tale exerts a powerful grip on the reader ... There is a pleasure too in the pace, which is perfectly timed despite the lack of action ... Just when I was tiring of the book’s slowness, it became almost thriller-like – a remarkable achievement, given that the action is still all occurring inside the head of so flattened a character ... Sometimes I wondered if my whole experience of reading the novel was driven more by curiosity and aesthetic pleasure than because I really cared about the character or was inhabiting his world ... Both in its power to unsettle and its quest to establish a relationship to character that isn’t based on understanding, this is a strikingly original piece of writing.
Vesna Goldsworthy
Rave The Guardian The question for writers returning to works of literature from the past is what to do about style ... In Monsieur Ka, there’s a more aesthetic engagement with the Russian novel, but this isn’t just homage or pastiche because the nature of linguistic translations and dislocations is itself a theme of the book. Goldsworthy, who is writing in her third language, is attentive to the way that thoughts and gestures are inflected by the language in which they are formulated ... Much of the pleasure of reading this remarkable novel comes from its passionate dedication to the power of stories.
A. M. Homes
Positive The Guardian \'It’s like a kinky psychodrama,\' says Cheryl, the student protagonist of the final story in AM Homes’s new collection. She’s talking to her friend Walter. They’re both dressed up in her parents’ clothes. The line comes from within the role-play and outside it. She’s commenting on the peculiarity of their idea of an afternoon’s entertainment but also on the absurdity of her life in general: a life in the upper echelons of Los Angeles, where even the dog has had plastic surgery to remove its unappealing fatty tumours, the TV channel changes depending on who’s walking past and their favourite restaurant serves only tiny designer-sized macrobiotic bites ... Much of Homes’s skill lies in inventing plots that seem just about plausible as she leads you along but far less plausible when you stop to consider them. She narrates the stories in a pacy present tense, energised by amusing quips and details.
Claudia Renton
Rave The Guardian Those Wild Wyndhams is a magnificent first book by the historian and barrister Claudia Renton ... [a description of the book] together with the unnecessarily florid gold writing on the cover, may imply an entertaining romp. In fact it\'s something far more profound. Renton\'s book has the wisdom, excitement and psychological depth of a very good novel. She succeeds in the difficult feat of combining the novelist\'s art with the historian\'s craft, laying her sources and workings before us ... The beauty and romance – sometimes joyful, more often wrenchingly sad – are captured unforgettably in Renton\'s wonderful book.
Sheila Heti
Rave The Guardian \"But now Sheila Heti’s book seems likely to become the defining literary work on the subject, perhaps most of all because as a novel, replete with ambiguity and contradiction, it refuses to define anything, and certainly not the childlessness that provides its subject or the motherhood that provides its title ... This sounds hard-hitting, and it is, but it’s also deeply ambivalent, woven as one strand among many in a book that does, after all, claim to be a novel. Perhaps it’s most novelistic in its dextrous use of the present tense (there is a sense of a life unfolding, rather than being recorded) and in the sense, gradually built up, that the book knows more than the narrator does, in her fear and rage and naivety ... She is asking what her book can count for, and the answer is a lot. It’s hard to do justice to its complexity. This is less a book than a tapestry – a finely wrought work of delicate art.\
James Wood
Positive The Guardian This isn’t a particularly ambitious novel. Wood doesn’t attempt to redeem British fiction ... As a British novelist living in the US he chooses to focus on transatlantic differences, but it’s hard to address these without resort[ing] to cliche ... Nonetheless, Wood does succeed in both achieving verisimilitude and revealing its artifice. Though all the characters verge on caricature, they are convincingly alive in a way that those in his previous novel were not ... it’s also through them that he enables the why question to take on life – and therefore to matter. He creates a world where we can’t know whose point of view to accept, and therefore can’t know whether to dismiss Vanessa’s fear that \'everything that is most dear to you will eventually be taken from you\' as hysterical anxiety or to accept it as wisdom.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The Guardian Evelina's is the first voice we hear in a novel that is told through a Faulknerian motet. A modern young woman who reads Camus in French, she is none the less brought up on the fairy tales of her Native American ancestors. Her narrative begins with an account of her puberty in which the teenage blends with the mythical … We are helped along by the book's quirky humour that comes through cameo characters who are too singular to be caricatures … This is not magic realism; it is so grounded in the detail of the everyday that we are barely aware that Erdrich is tugging at the seams of the realistically possible.
Xiaolu Guo
Rave The Financial Times Aside from the fast-paced plot, this is most interesting for its probing portrayal of Guo’s ambivalent relationship with her homeland ... Nonetheless she doesn’t sentimentalise China or her life there. An impressive feature of this moving and often exhilarating book is the brutality of her portrait of her parents ... The question here is what kind of loyalty we owe those bound to us by blood. It is not coincidental, Guo thinks, that the protagonists of all her favourite novels have been orphans — 'parentless, self-made heroes.' This is her myth, too, but her strength lies in her acknowledged ambivalence. Even as she escapes gravity and floats into the future, she feels the obstinacy of the roots that pull her back into the past.
Sigrid Rausing
Rave The Guardian In seeking an alternative to the headlines, Rausing offers thoughtfulness and introspection. She also provides a lot of self-flagellation ... But what gives this book its astonishing power is not the guilt, but the intelligence and literary skill. As a narrative, it’s beautifully structured, weaving its way from the family’s childhood holidays in rural Sweden to their lives in London, returning always to the hideous image of Hans and Eva’s bedroom as the dark centre of the story ... She appears in these contradictions still not to have decided the extent of her responsibility or guilt. However, she seems at least partially aware of this, and what makes the approach effective is that when it comes to opening up wider questions of culpability or the nature of addiction, she is consistently more subtle than we would expect in a memoir of this kind.
Gabriel Tallent
Rave The Guardian This is abuse, and Tallent doesn’t shy away from the fact, but he is also insistent on naming their love as love. This is partly down to the lyricism of his prose. It is additionally because Martin, though a controlling monster who’s trapped Turtle in a frightening folie à deux, has created a world that remains enticing for her, primarily because of their shared closeness to nature ... From the point that Jacob and his friend Brett appear on the scene, the novel becomes a fast-paced adventure story...This phase of the story is too heavily plotted for my liking, because when you’re anxiously turning the pages wondering what will happen next there’s less time to appreciate the detail along the way, and it’s detail that Tallent is so good at. When he slows down, there’s an excitement in smaller moments ... At the end of this strange and remarkable book, civilisation triumphs. When we last see her, physically and spiritually broken, all Turtle can do is plant a garden in the town. This is a world beyond philosophy in which nourishment comes from nameable and tangible things. Her plants repeatedly die, but she tries again.
Nadeem Aslam
Rave The Guardian As in all his previous novels, Aslam mingles beauty and pain, but this time he gives the beauty more breathing space than he has for a while ... Aslam is in many ways a traditional realist: he wanders into the head of one character after another at will. But he’s writing a form of realism in which individual psychology is often secondary to larger symbolic structures and archetypes...If character is secondary to archetype, this reflects the reality of a world in which the individual is frequently secondary to collective ideology. Ultimately, Aslam doesn’t allow this ideology to triumph, because the consolation offered by both the visual beauty and the coincidences comes in the service of a redemptive moral view ... [an] exquisite, painful book.
Sara Baume
Rave The Guardian This is material that in the wrong hands might be pretentious or merely dull. In Baume’s telling, though, it’s fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator’s mind. And along the way there are crucial questions raised about how we perceive reality ... Art may also require a willingness to question the ordinary that is incompatible with conventional criteria of sanity. One of the most radical aspects of this novel is its challenge to received wisdom about mental illness ... There are no answers here, but there is a reminder of the beauty that can be found when you allow yourself to look slowly and sadly at the world.
Elif Batuman
Rave The Guardian The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves ... What is at stake here is whether Selin can continue to commit generous errors in the face of such humiliation; whether she can continue so earnestly in her attempt to learn how to live. The triumph of Batuman’s book is to make this period of youth matter.
Emily Witt
Positive The Guardian The book that results is fascinating, both because it’s always interesting to hear about the sex lives of others and because it opens up an historical context that allows us to understand how the free love of the past did and didn’t lead to our internet-driven sexual present ... Witt is a compelling narrator and an excellent subjective witness but I did find her presence in the book a little coy.
Eimear McBride
Positive The Guardian What is most remarkable is McBride’s sensitivity to moment-to-moment shifts in feeling ... It is notoriously difficult to write about sex, and McBride does it better than almost any other contemporary novelist I’ve read ... the novel becomes a little baggy at this point [the second half] ... The Lesser Bohemians confirms McBride’s status as one of our major novelists.
Adam Haslett
Rave The Guardian Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle. There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths. But there is still a contemporary social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur ... Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose. As in Faulkner, each of the voices emerges from somewhere between speech, thought and writing, but here the characters are articulate enough that we can believe that the words are theirs ... my two days of reading the book felt less like a reading experience than a life experience: two days of terror and loss ... There is a lot about honour and care here: about what it means to honour and care for both ourselves and those we love. Haslett’s prose, so finely adapted for each of the characters, seems to do just this, honouring the living and the dead and rendering life precious.
Sarah Bakewell
Rave The Guardian The book that results is the most engaging work of philosophy I have read.
Jessa Crispin
Mixed The Guardian There are nine cities in all, inhabited by a scattered collection of writers, muses and artists who have little in common. Gradually, they begin to feel arbitrary and Crispin’s reflections on them seem superficial. It is not true, for example, that West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon contains nothing of its author, but to explain how her passions infuse its pages would take longer than the brief space Crispin allows.
Stacy Schiff
Rave The Guardian These are upsetting tales and Schiff writes movingly as well as wittily; this is a work of riveting storytelling as well as an authoritative history. Schiff’s explanations for the events are convincing.