RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)This is a novel concerned with agency in relationships, specifically female agency, and the question of how to maintain one’s mind when enmeshed with another person ... Rarely does Costello lose hold of Anna’s voice, which feels urgent and full of awe ... There is also a certain kindness to the writing ... The only slip, and it is minor, is the novel’s pacing ... Still, we remain entranced ... A beautiful novel; Mary Costello guides her reader through a cloud of emotional turmoil in fine, controlled sentences. We must hope it delivers her the belated recognition she so richly deserves.
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)There are many who feel that Smith is a better essayist than she is a novelist, and whatever the merits of putting a writer in competition with herself, it is true that her nonfiction has a particular shine. She makes it look easy. Her sentences read as though she is talking to us ... Smith is a rapacious reader, museum-goer, cinephile. She still writes criticism with a novelist’s brain: she loves narrative and will often recreate the relevant book or film scene by scene, leading us along with her ... If there is a manifesto here, a unifying thread, it is a plea that we turn our backs on the internet ... Her rallying cry might only reinforce the impression that she lives a very different life from the rest of us (\'All you guys would need do is look up\'), but she is always persuasive, generally correct, and her voice – shaded with nostalgia, optimism and wit – is always a delight.
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The greatest strength of...Aysegül Savas is that she writes so well about homesickness ... Leaves us squirming in discomfort and sympathy ... Well rendered ... The story’s skill...lies in its subtlety.
Danielle Dutton
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)Swerving into non-fiction risks breaking the book’s momentum, yet the authority of Dutton’s essay balances out the dreaminess of her stories ... You’re never sure whether Dutton is still on the outside, or getting at the narrator’s anxiety within. But that uncertainty feels part of this project, which gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them.
