RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)A wide perspective supports many close-up views of particular places in a way that at times recalls the novels of Annie Ernaux ... Messud provides narrative nudges, noting in parenthesis what is to come for a character, as well as revealing a long-held secret of a family scandal. She also suggests that the new generation will bring hope and clarity. Her strong prose style holds the mosaic together ... he paints lyrical views of mountains and lakes and snow-covered hills, but also makes use of dialogue and telephone conversations ... What the novel really excels in is powerful moments when prosaic events are pierced with feeling. Claire Messud’s description of a fleeting tenderness between Barbara and the unsteady François, many years into their often fractious marriage, infuses the everyday with the transcendent.
Jenny Uglow
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)[A] warm and inclusive double biography ... Jenny Uglow’s rich evocation of the past creates a lavish detailed background and illuminates the complex circumstances in which art is made. Her personal approach takes in the emotional lives of her subjects and their family connections. It also brings out the curious features of their joint biography.
Tim Parks
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Like many travel writers, Parks can easily conjure up a romantic vision of Bella Italia ... He balances his passionate but vague evocation of Orvieto Cathedral and his appreciation of hilltop towns with down-to-earth observations of hot tarmac, litter, gated empty villas, barking dogs and muddy streams. He has sharp words for Matteo Salvini, Italy’s former deputy prime minister, and for the Borghi più belli (Most beautiful towns/villages) scheme, designed to attract tourism ... When making aesthetic judgements – on museum displays, paintings, architecture—Parks does not describe and seems eager only to avoid any conventional response. His deliberately sour tone prevents the book from being used as a simple substitute for a holiday in Italy ... Safely home in his flat in Milan, Park muses on nationhood in characteristically reductive terms.
Francis Spufford
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... Spufford’s generous writing style combines a close-up view of events with a distant perspective ... exhilarating ... Elements of a serial or family saga are part of the pleasure, alongside narrative shocks, comic moments, horrifying incidents and moving contemplations of past and present ... Spufford’s tone is benign and unsatirical throughout, with the occasional hint of malice ... Quotations from songs and prayers, and moments of intense meditation, provide a counterbalance to the detailed descriptions of daily life and return the continuing narratives to the original metaphysical impetus and the idea that everyone is the centre of a world around which events assemble.
Hugo Vickers
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Almost the strangest aspect of this saga is the part played by the royal biographer Hugo Vickers, who first became interested in Gladys when he was sixteen while reading the diaries of Chips Channon. He followed her trail to the hospital, where he became a friendly visitor, seeing her on sixty-five occasions before her death in 1977 at the age of ninety-six. In this updated and rewritten edition of his 1979 biography, Vickers is admirably sympathetic while at the same time collecting every detail of his subject’s transgressions and eccentricities. He is also indefatig- able when noting titled names and quoting from letters and diaries that do not hold back when it comes to emphasizing Gladys Deacon’s peculiar character and the strange life she led.
Hermione Lee
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... packed with information and crammed with picturesque detail. [The book] imitate[s] literary tourism by offering thoughts and associations rather than theory, and...make[s] use of both the eighteenth-century rise of tourism and the recent interest in family history. A further similarity is the use of personal experience as an aid to understanding a writer’s life.
Ann Patchett
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The narrative of The Dutch House is finely structured in a series of time slips, moving backwards and forwards, unfolding history and managing suspense ... Patchett’s gloomy descriptions of Harlem and her light evocation of the gardens of Elkins Park reveal the spirit of a place through its appearance, and her suggestive final chapter, in which a new generation is shown growing up and the future is both like and unlike the past, offers a coming together of the novel’s themes in a mood of forgiveness ... The idea that looking back and loss are intertwined and that fate is a series of chance events is unassertively demonstrated. The sheer ease of Patchett’s writing, her warm humour, natural dialogue and the clever unfolding of fictional justice keep the reader engrossed and enlightened.
