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Flora Carr
Mixed The Telegraph (UK) The Tower feels exhaustingly \"2024\" ... It’s admirable that Carr wants to strip these historic figures of the dowdiness that the passage of centuries can confer, but her attempts to force them into 21st-century moulds can be cringe-inducing. Carr’s prose, though mostly fine, is occasionally overladen with the kind of similes that only go down well at creative-writing workshops ... Still, there’s much to enjoy in The Tower.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Pan Spectator (UK) Moshfegh’s fiction tends to focus on one person, but here she has a groaning cast list. The trouble is, the many characters rather resemble one another: they’re all disgusting, immoral, selfish and kinky; they all deserve, more or less, the more or less terrible fates that await them. Moshfegh has said that reading her books is ‘like seeing Kate Moss take a shit’. The experience of reading this one is like being stuck in a room with about 20 people defecating, but none of them is Kate Moss ... The novel is extraordinarily violent and disturbing, featuring child molestation, cannibalism and worse. But extreme as it is, it’s not much else; it has sweetly reasonable points to make – for instance, about power (that it corrupts) and about capitalism (that it corrupts). Moshfegh is a beautiful writer – some of her sentences dazzled me so much I had to put the book down and sun myself in the light of her prose for a moment – but no amount of raw skill can make up for the fact that the ideas undergirding the book aren’t that interesting. And though it may be old-fashioned to crave tenderness in a novel, I missed it here: the characters are so awful to each other it becomes sapping ... The book isn’t without merit. At its best it’s like a twisted reworking of A Hundred Years of Solitude; and some readers will no doubt relish its icy intensity and Old Testament grimness. But if a writer with less star power than Moshfegh had written it, I suspect publishers would have laughed in disgust, pinched their noses and thrown it on the slush pile.
Philip Pullman
Mixed The Times (UK) Lyra’s ennui makes her a sometimes wearying heroine to mooch around with. I wanted, at times, to give her a bit of a shake — remind her what she’d achieved as a kid. But Pullman’s cast list is long and there are others with whom to have a jollier time ... not as tightly woven nor as richly imagined as any in His Dark Materials. The stakes are not as high: Lyra is no longer battling for the liberty of humankind. And at times the book feels overly episodic, with too weak a drumbeat driving the plot — it can be easy to forget who is doing what and why ... Yet Pullman’s story is still thought-provoking. He is an unabashedly moral writer who uses his characters as mules for big ideas, from quantum physics to the nature of devotion. This book elegantly weaves in live issues, from Europe’s refugee crisis to facts in the post-truth era. And Pullman’s prose is as rewarding as ever — spare, but never cold; flexible enough to carry all the different genres he pours into his paragraphs: folklore, theology, romance and so on. At 700 pages or so the book asks a lot of its readers. But the chapters skittered enjoyably by for me and by the end I was grateful for the ride.
Nina Allan
Mixed The Times (UK) ... beautifully written and deeply strange ... Not all readers will gel with the book’s structure ... Of the three strands, Bramber’s letters are the most engrossing ... Allan writes about neglect and transgression very well. There are some wonderfully taut scenes in which characters betray one another, often violently. But it is hard to remain gripped by the rest. Andrew’s meandering journey from London to Cornwall is stretched out tediously, and more than once I found myself asking why I should care, about him or anything he is doing ... While Allan has crowded the book with imaginative protagonists — sinister shopkeepers, a paedophilic collector of automata — none, including the dolls, emerges as a character worth rooting for.
Laura Cumming
Positive The Times (UK) The mystery of Betty’s provenance is the enigma that keeps the memoir’s pulse tickings ... When the story strays far from Betty and along minor twiglets of the family tree, it can become somewhat meandering, like a stranger telling you at great length at a party what their great uncle got up to at the turn of the century, when you’re dying to get to the bar. However, Cumming skilfully withholds key twists in the tale, revealing them at just the right moment. There are surprises, but no shocks. Her prose is too elegant for such gaudiness — composed and restrained, but empathetic ... Cumming intuitively refracts the natural world through art — on a crisp day, the Chapel beach is as crystal clear as a Seurat painting; on a windy day it whorls into a Turner. Nonetheless, more jokes and madcap characters would have livened up proceedings. From the microscopic details of her family history, Cumming wisely pans out to reflect on bigger ideas — the composition of personality, the origins of artistic impulse ... beautifully written ...
Elif Shafak
Positive The Times (UK) [Shafak] writes with immense compassion about those too damaged, defiant or different to fit in ... Shafak skilfully weaves in references to historical events happening around her before then. Some of these moments can’t help but sound political and pointed: the young and idealistic, taking to the streets or forming subversive friendships. One of the standout scenes depicts Leila in Taksim Square in 1977 when gunmen fire into a crowd gathered to mark International Workers’ Day ... The novel is no masterpiece — its prose can feel functional and is sometimes too emphatic — but the story Shafak weaves is deeply moving. And it can often be surprisingly upbeat, as Leila, an outcast herself, assembles around her a merry band of misfits who love her better than her blood family ever could. The result is imaginative and admirably tight, a novel that paints a memorable and nuanced picture of life on the fringes of Turkish society.
Susan Choi
Mixed The Times Choi writes about teenage obsession well, capturing the mayfly life span of young friendships and alliances. She successfully exhorts the reader to remember the expansiveness of adolescence, in which a year can be crushed into a morning and emotion is \'packed like gunpowder into the barrel\' ... Yet the book is hard to fall for. It wants to mess with your expectations, to whip the rug from under your feet. Some readers will find its forays into metafiction tedious or navel-gazing; I did. This is a novel about trust: the testing of it, the straining of it, the blowback that can ensue when trust is severed. Nothing, Choi indicates somewhat laboriously, should be taken at face value, least of all the fevered stories we tell ourselves about our teenage years.
Tom Lee
Positive The Times (UK) \"It is hard not to think of Kafka’s Metamorphosis when reading the book, partly because Lee’s writing, too, pulses with humour and an appreciation of the abject silliness of human beings ... [Lee] writes with a needle, and with a short-story master’s eye for structure. And although the plot is not predictable, when it yields its twists, they feel satisfyingly right.\
Sylvia Plath
Mixed The Sunday Times The prose is not as radiant as in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar, published 11 years later, but there is still plenty to admire: a masterly ratcheting up of tension over 40 pages; short, simple sentences that slip between the ribs ... here are invigorating references to hard bright reds, dun browns and uneasy blues. Yet the conclusion of the tale disappoints (I wanted more of the ninth kingdom, whatever it was). The story is essential reading for diehard fans of Plath’s work, but is perfectly missable otherwise.
Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Rave The Times (UK) It is a remarkable book, much more than the lurid celebrity tell-all it might have become in a less able writer’s hands ... Brennan-Jobs writes perceptively about her father’s magnetism ... Throughout the book she is happy to stress how obsessively her younger self sought Jobs’s approval ... Were Small Fry an uninterrupted stream of Jobs anecdotes, it would quickly get dull. Thankfully it isn’t. It is also a gorgeously written evocation of 1980s California ... The book also movingly explores the self-sacrifice demanded of skint single mothers ... Brennan-Jobs writes compassionately about her mother’s fragility.
Eliza Robertson
Mixed The Times (UK) Her skill as a writer is beyond question: every sentence feels crafted and she evokes America in the 1950s and early 1960s with such care that it seems to swim before the reader’s eyes like a heat haze ... The plot meanders choppily towards its implausible ending, like a series of short stories sewn together. Willa’s studied passivity, her lack of a sense of humour and her inability to stand up to her drunken mother and cruel sister rapidly become more tiresome than interesting.