About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lauren Elkin
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) It’s a novel that appears to be doing one thing, but is in fact doing something far cleverer, and more fun ... Two novels in one: the first a rather pseudy example of sad-girl lit, the second a compelling whodunnit-style revelation of the hidden connections between strangers ... If you can forgive the novel’s more pretentious moments, it is tremendously satisfying to solve the puzzle that Elkin has laid out for us.
Coco Mellors
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) \"The decision to centre the novel round a family rather than a disparate group of youthful hedonists immediately makes Blue Sisters feel warmer and more mature. The heart of the novel is love and grief, not lust and ambition. The protagonists feel more real too, with little quirks that elevate them beyond the novelistic equivalent of an Instagram highlights reel ... while Mellors tries to include a few working class people in the novel, it’s a half-hearted attempt...But these blips are more forgivable when there is a core of humanity at the novel’s heart ... That hope, the turn away from Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s cocaine-fuelled nihilism, is what redeems and matures Blue Sisters.\
Olivia Laing
Mixed The Sunday Times (UK) Her descriptions of the garden are lyrical, even heady ... She doesn’t quite pull it off.
Clair Wills
Positive The Times (UK) What separates this book from the glut of Angela’s Ashes-style tragic Irish memoirs is Wills’s insightful analysis of social history at each step ... It makes for a circumlocutory book, as Wills shifts between generations, telling us multiple versions of events. There is too much chat about methodology ... But this is only frustrating because the stories, once we get to them, are so compelling.
Téa Obreht
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) \"Obreht, the author of 2011’s Orange prizewinner The Tiger’s Wife, is from the former Yugoslavia. That fact becomes increasingly pertinent as The Morningside unfolds. Like The Tiger’s Wife, it is imbued with magical realism, but here it is done with a light touch. Are things really as strange as they seem? Or is this simply what a dying world looks like to a child? ... There is a pleasing fairytale tone to this tale, but it’s matched with a big, chunky plot. Obreht weaves together a number of storylines...it all comes together at the end, but in a way that feels rushed, like a slightly panicked afterthought ... More moving is the depiction of not-quite apocalypse, which our own future could well resemble. Sil’s mother reckons with the changes she’s seen over her lifetime: \'I realised that I’d brought you into life at a time when everyone else’s debts had come true,\' she tells Sil. But eventually she accepts it: \'The past is immense. But it means less and less. So we go on without. And that’s fine, Sil. It’s fine.\' I enjoyed the simplicity of her conclusion, typical of a book that is equal parts eerie and charming. It’s less dramatic than a plot to save the world—but it feels more authentic.\
Paul Lynch
Pan The Times (UK) \"...if I had to judge Prophet Song on conveying this political message, I would say it had succeeded. But I have to judge it on its value as a novel, and this is where things get trickier. Printed on the back of the book is a glowing blurb by the author Samantha Harvey. Reading Prophet Song, she says, \'you remember why fiction matters.\' So why does fiction matter? Should it influence hearts and minds, provoke political change? Or should it do more? Should it, as Nabokov famously said, provide \'aesthetic bliss,\' invoking a little shiver of pleasure in our spines? ... There are plenty of great political novels, but they start off with the story, not the message. This is where Lynch falls down, often displaying motives and exposition crudely through dialogue ... There are moments of beauty in Prophet Song ... And there are some brilliantly fast-paced scenes too ... But these remain rare glimpses of Lynch’s talent, of what the novel could have been. It’s a pity that it becomes an exercise in totalitarianism-by-numbers.\
Johanna Hedman, trans. Kira Josefsson
Positive The Times (UK) A smart, elegant and moving novel ... Hedman’s characters keep us at a tantalising arm’s length most of the time, and that makes moments of raw emotion all the more powerful.
Ismail Kadare
Mixed The Sunday Times (UK) The book is also not really a novel. It’s more like a cross between memoir, dream diary and historical investigation, in which Kadare trawls through reported versions of what was said during the phone call, with meditations on truth, creativity and tyranny ... Not an easy read ... At some point you start to ask yourself what the point is of this seemingly infernal game of Chinese whispers. But the climate of uncertainty that Kadare constructs with this many-versioned phone call reflects the uncertainty of life under authoritarian rule.
Anne Enright
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) This is a beautiful, mature novel, which includes the familiar Enright touchstones: her wonderfully wicked sense of humour and her unflinching focus on the female body. But Enright is not a complacent writer. She is just as capable of bringing the Gen Z, social media manager Nell to life as she is entering the world of Carmel, a woman of her own generation ... This is Enright’s best novel since The Gathering, and its absence from this year’s Booker longlist is nothing less than a miscarriage of literary justice. Readers must find it and treasure it regardless.
Emma Donoghue
Positive The Times (UK) As a reader you want to feel in safe, well-researched hands, but you don’t necessarily need paragraphs explaining the specifics of Georgian fashion. Donoghue, alas, enjoys such paragraphs ... The sex scenes, when they arrive, tend more towards obfuscation ... Donoghue wants to give a voice to a woman whom society silenced, and she spent decades researching to do it. Even if Learned by Heart has flaws as a novel, it succeeds in bringing to life this fascinating character.
Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. by Shaun Whiteside
Positive The Times (UK) Ambitious, enthralling ... What do these four women have in common? Not much ... I would have appreciated a little more direction. Without it, you float from one mind to another: thrilling, but slightly disorientating. This book demands close attention; it rewards rereading; it tackles big ideas unapologetically. In short, Eilenberger treats you like a grown-up ... This is a wonderful book. But I get the sense that Eilenberger really wanted to write a book about Weil, and was slightly irritated at having to include her peers.
Emma Cline
Pan Sunday Times (UK) Cline’s second novel, The Guest...arrives lumbered with very high expectations. It fails to meet them ... The premise is intriguing ... A novel defined by lack ... The ending is an unsatisfying cliffhanger. Worse still, the prose feels sterile, there’s no character development and no structural analysis either ... Vibes do not a novel make. Enough with the nihilistic detachment; I want a story to make me feel something.
Sophie Mackintosh
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) The novel is about competing histories, conflicting memories, and how love makes fools of us all ... Can often feel like a novel on drugs — lots of visceral feelings; very few names, places or even objects. But that description overlooks the craft required to create such a mood ... Mackintosh is a skilful stylist, a writer who affords prose the care and attention usually withheld for poetry. Her words invite immediate rereading; her metaphors feel true and fresh.
Sarah Gilmartin
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) A clunky plot device, one that exposes Gilmartin’s newness to the novel form. But put that aside and the tapestry she goes on to weave, one of a family battered by tragedies, is rich and vibrant ... Gilmartin writes beautifully about being and losing a twin ... Tragedies, Gilmartin seems to say, are not sealed-off stories — they happen all the time, and are mixed in with laughter too.
Alice Winn
Positive The Times (UK) The horrors of life in the trenches are described in stomach-turning detail ... Winn has not written this book for easy reading on the Tube. There is an ease to her writing, though, a zippy confidence, unusual for a debut, that allows her to skip across Europe ... In Memoriam concludes in a slightly lacklustre fashion, with a feeling of lost momentum. Loose ends are tied up, characters married off or exiled, but Winn refuses an easy happy ending. She shows the rather less satisfying reality of living with the trauma of war.
Dizz Tate
Rave Sunday Times (UK) In truth Brutes is not an easy read. But it is an impressive one, thanks to Tate’s almost frightening powers of description. It has been a long time since I read a novel that so viscerally evoked a feeling of place ... Brutes’s narrative structure is complex and often taxing: this is a novel that rewards rereading. The girls’ collective voice switches between before and after Sammy goes missing, and is interspersed with the girls’ grown-up individual narratives. Tate’s experience as a short-story writer comes out in full force here ... With its plot twists, grotesque horror and cartoonish villains, Brutes is a novel that refuses to be reasonable. That’s part of its unsettling charm. But as the shock of the ending wears off, it’s the humid atmosphere of Florida that will stay with you, the smell of rotting food and a contaminated lake. It’s an astonishing debut that will burrow under your skin.
John Boyne
Pan The Sunday Times (UK) Many individuals and organisations, including, for example, the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association, have pointed out [The Boy in the Striped Pajamas\'] problems ... Boyne has decided to rectify none of these issues in his ill-advised sequel ... It becomes clear that Boyne did not intend to worry about such minor details as narrative plausibility ... This is an adult book, but it has clunky narrative links that would be out of place even in a children’s story. There are difficult moral questions here, but they are obscured, unfortunately, by the ridiculousness of the plot.
Julia May Jonas
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) With a title that inevitably brings to mind Nabokov and his Lolita and a blurb that advertises its #MeToo credentials, you might imagine it to be a simple morality tale. You’d be wrong ... like everyone in this twisty, sexy, shocking treat of a novel, she doesn’t comfortably fit into any villain/victim template ... jaw-dropping gear shift changes everything. I was utterly hooked ... Occasionally, the students descend into snowflake caricatures, but as a whole this is an astonishing debut, unashamedly plotty without sacrificing style or depth, and thought-provoking without being too cringingly zeitgeisty. How on earth will Julia May Jonas better this?
Hervé Le Tellier, Tr. Adriana Hunter
Pan The Times (UK) ... a disappointment. This is a novel of two genres and, put together, they curdle ... the book often reads like a low-budget Hollywood script ... The book’s questionable metaphysics might be forgivable if it didn’t revert to blockbuster devices ... Le Tellier is excellent at examining the minutiae of human relationships. But he should have left the big explosions to the experts.