Jean Hanff Korelitz

Rave The Financial Times (UK) ... satisfyingly sprawling ... Korelitz empathetically cradles husband and wife, each mired in their own loneliness and pain, tender but truthful about both their wounds and their failings. When, in the second of the book’s three parts — which opens in the autumn of 2000, when the triplets leave home for college — their point of view is surpassed by that of their children, it can’t help but feel like a bit of a loss ... With every new book Korelitz publishes she adds another string to her bow, and she is a writer of many talents ... a contemporary play on the big, baggy 19th-century novel. It’s a little too mannered to qualify strictly as a state-of-the-nation piece; nevertheless, class, race and politics all play their part, and with especially entertaining effect as far as Harrison’s storyline is concerned ... Jam-packed with incident — a tragic accident, an extramarital affair, a secret love child — and equally heavy on revelation and reconciliation, there’s something slightly over the top about the whole thing, each twist and turn of the plot meticulously constructed ... Korelitz’s prose verges on verbosity, and she is free and easy with her exclamation marks. One gets the distinct impression that she’s having fun with every flourish, though, particularly when it comes to her chapter headings, in the grand tradition of Dickens or Fielding ... deliciously appealing.

Maggie Shipstead

Positive Financial Times (UK) It’s a savvy move on the part of Shipstead’s publishers to treat those fans to this collection of stories ... A couple of the stories felt a little flat ... All the same, the remarkable scope of Shipstead’s imagination and talent is well evidenced in the collection as a whole ... If there is a unifying element to these stories, it’s the tender but unflinching way in which Shipstead writes about various damaged souls ... Although obviously not as remarkable an achievement as Great Circle, there’s still lots to recommend these sharp, striking flashes of life.

Hernan Diaz

Rave The Telegraph (UK) A chorus of inharmonious but overlapping stories that teases the reader until the very last page. The novel is made up of four books, each a discrete volume, but in conversation with the others ... The final two books are by far the most revealing, their ­disclosures destabilising and ­complicating what we have already been told, but to go into the details would, I fear, spoil the fun. What I will say is that Diaz deftly illustrates how the worlds of finance and ­fiction are built on similarly shifting sands, right down to a shared ­lexicography ... The knotty ingenuity of Trust makes it easy to see how it’s won its place on this year’s Booker longlist. Destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels, it’s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner.

Kay Dick

Rave The Paris Review ... [a] disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale ... much of the novel’s power lies in its mystery ... Given that Dick made a habit of loosely fictionalizing her own experiences, I’ve come to think of her protagonist in They as female. Even more inscrutable though are the \'they\' of the book’s title...extremely dangerous and violent, but also strangely vacant and automaton-like. \'They\' are rarely distinguished as individuals, which situates them in stark contrast to the narrator and her acquaintances ... It’s chilling, but compellingly so. All the more so because of the seamless way in which Dick stitches together what’s an evocatively drawn portrait of otherwise idyllic rural England with this shadow landscape of fear and violence ... There are many ways to read the book: as a straightforward Orwellian dystopia, a sequence of vividly drawn nightmares, or...perhaps even as a metaphor for artistic struggle ... Like any strong allegory, They can be read many ways, but is perhaps best, and most accurately, read as a plea for individual and intellectual freedoms by a woman artist who refused to...live by many of society’s rules.

Kathryn Schulz

Rave Financial Times (UK) Luminescent ... [A] deft, roving and elegantly written work ... [Schultz] has...an incredible capacity to make everything pertinent ... Schulz begins with the specificity of her own experience, but the book soon becomes a discussion of the broader, existential reckoning we each must make with impermanence, both of our own existence, and that of the people we love ... Cynics might find the garrulousness with which she waxes lyrical about her adoration of C a tad overearnest. But rarely do we encounter writing that originates from such a firm bedrock of love and happiness as that described in Lost & Found ... Through it all, though, Schulz is attuned to the extraordinary in the ordinary ... Lost & Found is itself a marvel of a meditation. It left me moved, inspired and ultimately elated.

Katie Kitamura

Rave The Financial Times (UK) ... spellbinding ... it’s here, in these slippages, that the novel’s thrilling, ominous energy is found ... a brilliant examination of language conveyed with the kind of pacing, tautness and menace usually associated with a thriller ... The pervasive sense of threat that envelops the book is further heightened by the piercing clarity of the prose. Kitamura’s every bit as precise as her narrator, and the cool restraint of her writing — even when dealing with heightened emotional and moral stakes — is nothing short of magnificent ... is both a gripping read and a chilling consideration of what’s involved when we choose to ignore the things we don’t want to see, let alone understand

Keith Ridgway

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... ingeniously slippery ... What initially looks like a collection of loosely linked short stories reveals itself to be an expertly constructed house of mirrors ... Reading A Shock feels a little like being a regular at the Arms, your attention momentarily grabbed by a snippet of someone else’s conversation as a voice drifts across the bar, a name or a turn of phrase tugging at something half-remembered, so that you strain to tune in to hear the rest. It’s the kind of novel that rewards multiple readings, new echoes and connections revealing themselves each time. And, in the same way that one character describes the unsettling, near-hallucinatory side effects of doing certain drugs — \'it’s just peripheral, corner of the eye stuff, movements\' — you get the sense of myriad other lives unfolding around those described here, all tantalizingly out of sight.

Brandon Taylor

Rave Financial Times (UK) [An] impressive first collection ... Although each of the stories here can be read as a stand-alone work, over half of them are perhaps best described as chapters of a novella-length piece ... the cloistered world of student life offers Taylor the perfect canvas for the emotionally charged interplay between an insular cast. Most significantly though, these stories provide further evidence that intimacy is Taylor’s great subject ... moments of connection that pepper these stories feel so miraculous. But welcoming relief involves acknowledging the true depth of the void that’s been filled ... Taylor also dares to show us how violence can be an act of terrible intimacy.

Paul Mendez

Positive iNews (UK) Rainbow Milk is an important and ambitious book. From the Windrush generation through the Aids crisis, to what it means to be a black, gay writer in Britain today, Mendez stitches blackness, disability and illness, queerness and class deep into the fabric of the narrative ... Overly earnest discussions of music...are lengthy ... certain key events confusingly happen off stage ... There is much more to applaud than there is to criticise, though ... the chapters detailing the traumas of Jesse’s adolescence – think Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight but set in the West Midlands, with Bibles instead of crack – are beautifully done.

Patricia Engel

Rave The Financial Times (UK) ... poignant ... Engel delicately highlights the myriad cracks underlying the patina of this mixed-status family ... As in The Veins of the Ocean, Engel astutely depicts how exile is both a physical and a psychological state ... The quiet gracefulness of Engel’s prose further elevates the power of this beautifully written tale. Infinite Country is both a damning indictment of immigration policies that split up families, and an intimate story of one family’s search for home.

Patricia Lockwood

Rave Friday Magazine Often filthy and irreverent, sometimes extremely funny, and ultimately surprisingly poignant, No One Is Talking About This offers more proof of Lockwood’s particular genius. But it’s also that rarer thing: a novel about the way we live now that manages to be something more than just an exercise in the replication of our fragmented...online existence. Lots of novelists have tried to get inside this experience, but none that I’ve read does it as well – or as movingly – as this ... Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this novel is that it shows us beauty and magnificence everywhere, especially when we’re not expecting it.

Sarah Moss

Rave The New York Review of Books In its nuanced, immersive portraits of these families, Summerwater is more than just a quarantine novel. Narrated in the close third person, each of the book’s twelve main chapters takes us inside a different character’s mind, memories, observations, and daydreams jostling together in passages of free indirect speech, attentive to how national and global issues play out in the minutiae of the characters’ daily lives. The cumulative effect is an astute and polyphonic portrait of contemporary Britain ... From one chapter to the next, Moss deftly switches tenor and psychology ... a chorus of interiority, locating us inside each character’s mind. That Moss gives us these streams of consciousness while keeping the pacing of the plot under such firm control intensifies the novel’s already palpable claustrophobia ... Examining domestic discontent and associated gendered presumptions has long been Moss’s forte, and she’s especially attuned to the unfair demands made on women ... Moss has proved herself to be one of the most discerning chroniclers of contemporary British life.

Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell

Rave Financial Times (UK) ... the connection between the violence in these pages and that in the country’s past is, by and large, ingeniously oblique ... Although Enriquez writes about a world that’s haunted by the horrors of the past—both the all-too-real incidents of history and the more nebulous menace associated with superstition and folklore—these tales aren’t traditional ghost stories. But she is interested in the way past darkness contaminates the present ... Enriquez pushes into territory that makes most of us uncomfortable ... Well worth any upset they cause, these glittering, gothic stories are a force to be reckoned with, and Enriquez’s talent and fearlessness is something to behold.

Jonathan Franzen

Rave BBC Purity presents us with a host of fascinating but flawed, powerful and complex female characters ... Purity is one of the best new novels I’ve read this year, a complex and clever tale with all the telltale markings of the author’s classics, but with a marked lightness and freshness of tone and touch ... Purity has a pleasurable jigsaw-like quality, with certain perfectly timed reveals that highlight how different its structure is to either The Corrections or Freedom.

Madeleine Watts

Rave Financial Times (UK) ...resplendent and compelling ... Without them ever feeling forced, parallels emerge between the figure of the unruly woman — specifically one who is sexually permissive — and the unmanageable natural world ... Watts’s prose crackles with electricity in the same way that the world she’s writing about prickles with danger ... In magnificently entwining the narrator’s physical unravelling with that of the spiralling climate crisis, The Inland Sea feels both urgent and alive. It’s a lush, original Bildungsroman for a terrifying new world.

Celia Paul

Rave The Telegraph (UK) [The] relationship, between artist and model, lies at the heart of Paul’s memoir ... Self-Portrait...is an unashamed bid to reclaim \'her own story\', to become master of her own life and art, rather than being reduced to an object in Freud’s ... Just as Paul regards her paintings of those closest to her as a record of her own existence, so too Self-Portrait is constituted by a series of portraits-in-writing ... Similarly, the texture of what she creates on the page is analogous to that of her paintings: her prose stripped back and minimalist, as devoid of excess adornment as her sombre, melancholy but emotionally charged canvases. Even at her most incendiary...Paul’s writing never loses this essence of calm solemnity ... For all this candour, Paul’s revelations retain an air of abstruseness...Somehow, she remains detached ... There’s something tremendously refreshing about Paul’s lack of sensationalism, which encourages a similar detachment in the reader ... Self-Portrait is both the obvious extension of Paul’s oeuvre, and a powerful, urgent and essential depiction of what it is to be a woman artist.

Esther Kinsky, Trans. by Caroline Schmidt

Rave Financial Times (UK) What makes Grove so noteworthy is the keening, perfectly weighted clarity of Kinsky’s prose; Caroline Schmidt’s elegantly considered translation is meticulous but never overstated ... Grove is a story of an existence stilled by loss, but the promise of life, and with it renewal and hope, pulses gently but steadily at its heart.

Kathryn Scanlan

Rave iNews (UK) ... will surely be a new reference point for flash fiction ... in the same way that Hemingway relies on the reader to fill in the blanks, Scanlan offers us a litany of lacunae within which our own imagination can take flight ... Scanlan’s work invites a similar sense of distrust and disorientation. Scenes from what feels like a dream dance across the page: a series of tableaux – some beautiful, others horrifying – are burned into the mind’s eye ... a Gothic house of horrors; open any of the doors inside and you will find something to marvel at, but you will probably also wish you hadn’t seen it.

Fernanda Melchor, Trans. by Sophie Hughes

Rave Financial Times This is not a book for the faint-hearted. The worst that humanity has to offer is detailed here — unimaginable violence and cruelty, bestiality, rape — and every page is littered with profanities ... Yet I found it impossible to look away...unfurls with the pressure and propulsion of an unforeseen natural disaster, the full force of Melchor’s arresting voice captured in Sophie Hughes’ masterful translation ... Each character’s story is transfixing ... There is no melodrama, no pity, just fearless realism that rises to a bloodbath of a crescendo ... Melchor presents her readers with a modern Boschian hellscape rendered in harrowing but magnificent detail; an unforgiving, furious portrait of a vortex of poverty, violence and helplessness.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Positive The Financial Times ... a novel that overturns the standard murder mystery ... It takes a particular audacity to troll the opening of your own novel, to set up and then undercut its premise all in the space of the first three pages...but Moshfegh has always had fun with her writing ... might initially appear to be about Magda, but really it’s a novel about novel writing; about how a storyteller creates narrative, plot and meaning out of otherwise random, insignificant events ... As a traditional murder mystery, Death in Her Hands doesn’t deliver. Readers expecting the touchstones of the genre will find themselves frustrated. Instead, though, the novel cracks open like a matryoshka doll, revealing multiple tales within ... lacks the wild, reckless brilliance of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but its dark, devious portrait of the troubled psychology of a lonely, stymied woman makes a mark all of its own.

Lily Tuck

Rave The New York Times Book Review ...restrained but remarkably arresting ... Using the same flat, fragmentary style that proved so fruitful in her most recent novel, Sisters, Tuck constructs her narrator’s story from a series of short, clipped sections, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, others no more than a line or two per page. It’s a master class in digression as a narrative device ... Heathcliff Redux is a much more visibly knotty intertextual exercise ... Fittingly, Tuck’s novella eventually reveals itself to be more a tale of self-delusion and internal conflict than the grand romance we were initially led to believe ... a haunting if slightly unbalanced collection. There’s something endlessly fascinating in the way Tuck’s interest in literary relationships extends even to the works in her own oeuvre.

Rebecca Solnit

Positive The Telegraph (UK) ... not a tell-all ... what many of us might think of as the anchoring details of a life only flicker into shape, indistinct as shadows on a wall ... Recollections of My Non-Existence, in tackling the silencing of women’s voices, finally supplies the personal story that lies behind the highly politicised, feminist essays she’s been writing over the past few years ... This is a book that goes to dark places, but it also cherishes the people who have helped Solnit on her way: in particular, queer culture ... both the story of where we’ve been and a celebration of how far we’ve come.