PanThe Spectator (UK)The book’s greatest offences...are not sexual but stylistic. Self’s maximalism has not aged well ... Self’s fiction occasionally arrives at characterisation by way of accretion, but Elaine’s interiority never quite coalesces.
Richard Powers
PanIrish Times (IRE)Undoubtedly timely ... Powers seems to be catering to the book-buying masses instead. Given the importance of his ecological message, it’s fair enough to seek a broader appeal, but we haven’t received any improvements in novelistic skills, such as characterisation and dialogue, in return. A twist visible from a nautical mile away fails to keep the plot afloat.
Rachel Kushner
PanFinancial Times (UK)Kushner’s novels are always more containers for thought than plot-driven narratives. But whereas her first three thrummed with energy, dazzling readers, Creation Lake feels more removed. The world of espionage has, of course, provided endless ambience for fiction. But Creation Lake is less spy novel spoof or eco-exposé than anthropological disquisition ... Disappointingly put-downable.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
PanTimes Literary Supplement\"Sadly, such riffs – in breathless prose that itself sounds infused with amphetamines – are insufficient to carry the reader for 450 pages. The ending – including a mini disquisition from the third-person narrator concerning their feelings about wealth – leaves us with neither the satisfaction of poetic justice nor empathy for the characters. Brodesser-Akner should have taken a page from Franzen, whose fiction improved when he started putting social criticism into essays rather than trying to \'Trojan-horse them into his novels’ characters or plot points,\' as she put it herself. And, while we desperately need more comedy in fiction, the humour in Long Island Compromise doesn’t always land. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this novel was written primarily with an eye to television.\
Rachel Cusk
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)I, for one, remain in camp Cusk ... Whatever their medium, artists are ultimately trying to make sense of the world. As that world makes increasingly less sense, their task becomes more complicated, and more necessary. The essayistic reflections on the female condition in Parade may irk or intrigue, but as its narrator remarks, \'art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word\'.
Miranda July
MixedFinancial Times (UK)If the other characters remain somewhat two-dimensional, this doesn’t feel entirely inconsistent with being inside someone’s head, at least in the book’s first half, when the focus is firmly on the narrator and Davey. The sketchy characterisation becomes more problematic, however, in the second half, when the narrator’s marriage comes back into view ... This is a welcome addition to novels addressing ethical non-monogamy ... Weirdness can get wearying over hundreds of pages. It’s like meeting a friend whose company is delightful for a drink but not the haul of a 10-course tasting menu. Still, All Fours has moments of brilliance, and kudos to July for writing about what it means to experience sex and intimacy when you’re no longer young.
Colm Toibin
MixedIrish Times (IRE)Tóibín is less interested in capturing a period than interiority ... Fans of Brooklyn will enjoy revisiting the characters, as well as cameos from previous novels set in Tóibín’s native Enniscorthy. But the carefully crafted characterisation for which he is so admired cedes some space to exposition of the back story and soap-operatic plotting, accelerating towards an inconclusive end.
Eliza Barry Callahan
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Brilliant ... Callahan’s philosophical prose, reminiscent of Fleur Jaeggy and Clarice Lispector, exhibits a quality of attention increasingly rare in our screen-addled era. But despite an anachronistic tone, she naturally weaves technology into the story.
Marilynne Robinson
MixedIrish Times (IRE)Promises a literary close read in addition to the theological one ... Not without its pleasures. I enjoyed Robinson’s analysis of narrative techniques, etymology and how translation has affected interpretation. But a beach read, it is not. Her nonfiction is denser and more dogmatic than her fiction: I missed John Ames’s gentle self-questioning. Without the empathy and elegance of the novels, for this lay reader, it felt like sitting on a hard wood pew in itchy Sunday best.
Charles Duhigg
MixedFinancial TimesReaders well versed in the social science of the past two decades won’t find much new in Supercommunicators. Once admired for combing academic research papers, Duhigg seems to have scoured the self-help section of his local bookstore instead ... The book does better where it allows for complexity ... By force of habit, perhaps, Duhigg can’t help but be prescriptive, offering a listicle on navigating online disagreements that amounts to being excessively polite.
Megan Nolan
PositiveThe Irish Times\"Where Nolan’s heart lies shows in the final product: she finds her stride in the family portrait, with the Greens – sympathetic despite their flaws – well-rendered ... The tabloid storyline is less compelling, and an encounter between Tom and Carmel, which feels like an attempt to bring the book’s two strands together, strikes a brief false note. Far better to approach Ordinary Human Failings as literary fiction than as a whodunnit.\
Anne Michaels
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)The characters in Held remain hazy. Michaels draws accolades for her incantatory prose — an image-rich style that has led to comparisons to her fellow Toronto resident the poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje. But the enchantment in Held is, alas, uneven ... Tails to form a solid enough container to hold the reader.
Susie Boyt
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)\"...deftly sidesteps the clichés that often plague stories involving drug abuse, and it conveys the complexities of loving someone who can’t love you back with remarkable delicacy ... Rarely have I so viscerally ached with a character, and yet Boyt’s wit beams shafts of light through the cracks of pain.\
Anne Enright
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Unfolds in the present while looping back to the past, offers...prolonged pleasure ... It is a testament to Enright’s capacious empathy that the characters emerge fully fledged ... Also sympathetic to the precarity faced by Gen Z ... Wry.
Lauren Groff
PanThe Sunday Times (UK)The Native Americans with whom the girl crosses paths are kept at a distance, though, meaning that post-colonial reflections...feel shoehorned in. Similarly, the musings on women sound more #MeToo than 17th-century ... From a sentence-level stylist such as Groff, the syntactical shenanigans grate ... The girl’s solitude keeps the stakes low. In the absence of characters invested in her fate, survival for its own sake is not enough.
Naomi Klein
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)\"The book is most engaging when Klein is essayistic rather than didactic. She deftly weaves in cultural representations of the double—from Dostoevsky and Graham Greene to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Jordan Peele’s film Us—to frame her thinking. The peek down the rabbit hole is elucidating, saving the rest of us from \'a master’s degree’s worth of hours\' immersed in \'extremely prolific and editing-averse\' podcasts. Klein (or her on-page doppelgänger) is companionable and self-deprecating. Reading Doppelganger is like being seated next to someone really interesting at a dinner party . . . but that doesn’t stop the reader from beginning to check their watch before dessert ... Klein’s amiable company can start to feel like a Trojan horse: I found myself wondering how I had gone from chuckling about Roth’s \'mommy issues\' to reading about Red Vienna. The book ends not with a bang but a whimper.\
Anna Funder
MixedThe Irish Times\"Funder aims to fill in the gaps of the six major biographies of Orwell published between the 1970s and 2003, all written by men, which gloss over his mistreatment of women and serial infidelity. She finds no evidence of the commonly-held notion that the Orwells had an open marriage.) She meticulously dissects her predecessors’ work to show the various ways O’Shaughnessy is erased or diminished, such as the use of the passive tense to suggest that things just happened, as if by magic ... While reclaiming forgotten histories is important, Wifedom is not the homerun that Stasiland was. Billed as a \'genre-bending masterpiece,\' its genres are less bent than muddled. The fictionalised sections, told in the present tense, create frequent tonal shifts. As noble as the book’s aim may be and as infuriating as Orwell’s behavior is, by speculating about O’Shaughnessy’s feelings, Funder ultimately risks the same bias error as the biographers who have effaced her — a fiction by addition rather than omission.\
Tessa Hadley
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)As ever in her oeuvre, Hadley masterfully uses the smallest details...to convey class and character ... What is a mystery in real life – the inner world of others – is thrillingly revealed in Hadley’s fiction ... There is ample Hadley here to savour this summer.
Claire Fuller
PanSunday Times (UK)Fuller is skilled at world-building...Yet the urban landscape outside the medical unit in The Memory of Animals remains largely unexplored, and despite her talent for rendering uneasy intimacies in stifling situations, even the dynamics between the five entrapped strangers are not fully fleshed out ... The Memory of Animals lacks the page-turning propulsion seen elsewhere in Fuller’s oeuvre.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann
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His sadism and her continued acceptance of his abuse make for uncomfortable reading. Their power dynamic serves as a political metaphor, with the early days of the affair suggesting the halcyon days before the corruption of socialist ideals ... Effectively captures the generational divide in Germany at the time of reunification ... Michael Hofmann, a poet and sharp-tongued literary critic, is a prolific translator from German. While his rendition of Kairos is mostly smooth, at times even James Salter-esque, I found myself missing the voice of Susan Bernofsky, who had translated Erpenbeck’s previous novels ... The translation hits some false notes ... The end of the affair is a clever analogue for the demise of the socialist experiment.
Michael Magee
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Sidesteps many common pitfalls plaguing debuts. Avoiding the solipsism that risks infecting in a first-person coming-of-age story, Magee’s secondary characters are fully fleshed out ... The book’s themes – masculinity, class and history – don’t offer easy resolutions. Instead, Magee deftly conveys the anxieties of a generation facing an uncertain future.
Jen Beagin
RaveFinancial Times (UK)Uproariously funny ... Big Swiss is a delight: after all, when did a book last make you laugh out loud?
Salman Rushdie
PanIrish Times (IRE)Scaffolded on a mythologised lost empire, framed as a translation of an epic poem, Victory City is about an eternally youthful femme fatale fighting religious fundamentalism ... The story, sadly, is a bit knit-by-number and the pace lags in the middle ... The sentences in Victory City are simple by Rushdie’s standards, fairytale-style peppered with one-liners. Strip away the exuberant vitality of the prose that so enchanted readers of Midnight’s Children (1981) and his shortcomings as a novelist, such as thin characterisation, come to the fore.
Janet Malcolm
RaveThe Financial Times\"Some pieces of the past are irretrievable, with the people who could fill in the blanks now gone; other details are intentionally held back. Malcolm teases us with their absence ... Still Pictures bucks the confessional mode we have come to expect from memoirs since the proliferation of the genre in the 1990s. But it doesn’t much matter that the pixels Malcolm chooses to share form an incomplete portrait. Like the bulk of her life’s work, at its heart is an inquiry into the elusiveness of truth. Although it may be her in the viewfinder, the real subject is the unreliability of the camera.
MixedFinancial Times (UK)Not much happens in Animal Life in the way of plot ... The novel lacks the narrative thrust of its predecessors.
John Boyne
PanIrish Times (IRE)The story of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, in which Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy imprisoned at Auschwitz, is incorporated in All the Broken Places in flashback. The historical inaccuracies, as such, persist ... The problem with All the Broken Places is less whether Gretel’s story is worth telling than how it’s told.
Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell
MixedThe Spectator (UK)Seamlessly translated ... Accolades aside, Seven Empty Houses is not Schweblin’s most realised work. ‘I am really interested in tension,’ she said in a recent interview. Tension, however, requires stakes, as skilfully erected in her novels Fever Dream, about a woman dying from the effects of pesticide, and Little Eyes, on the voyeuristic risks of technology. As the stories in this collection are more atmospheric than driven by character or plot, most remain vignettes. They court a sensation of strangeness but, unlike elsewhere in her oeuvre, stretching reality falls short of illuminating its absurdities.
Elizabeth Strout
MixedSpectator World (UK)Strout’s stand-out skill is rendering the emotional riptide roiling under ordinary lives ... Where the novel feels flat, however, is when it forgoes interior life to recount current events ... Hot-button topics such as child labor in Bangladesh and gender nonconformity get shoe-horned into the narrative, and Lucy’s usually endearing naivety veers perilously close to twee.
Ling Ma
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Among Ma’s recurrent themes are alienation and immigration ... The cover image of Bliss Montage, depicting oranges behind cellophane, suggests gratification just beyond reach ... Throughout the collection, Ma deftly captures the mood of what she has referred to as \'compromised pleasure\' ... Not all of the stories in Bliss Montage are fully achieved; a few struggle to evolve past their premise ... But as an observer who immigrated as a child, Ma offers an astute insider-outsider perspective and a sharp eye for detail ... With an affinity for ambiguous endings, Ma does not always offer readers a resolution ... Ma’s fiction puts us in dystopian-yet-familiar situations that illuminate absurdities.
Amy Liptrot
MixedFinancial Times (UK)The book blends memoir with nature writing, although Liptrot pushes the boundaries of the latter by surveying urban wildlife, traffic islands and the ecology of the internet ... The city remains at a remove ... Heartbreak is relatable enough, but the story lacks the self-discovery that one expects of a memoir ... The style of The Instant is more experimental than The Outrun ... There are glimpses of poetry in The Instant.
Mohsin Hamid
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)The allegory probes timely issues around race and identity without being heavy-handed, as Hamid’s wry humour leavens the weighty subject matter ... Where the book is most affecting is in its deft depiction of the personal: Oona’s and Anders’s deepening intimacy, the shifting dynamics with their parents and its poignant portrayal of loss ... While it may not seem an obvious beach read, at a slim 180 pages of text, The Last White Man can be savoured in a single, thought-provoking sitting.
Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)Kawakami was a blogger and a poet before becoming a novelist. Deftly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, her prose retains the accessibility of a blog, with glimpses of lyricism ... By highlighting the inner lives of outsiders, Kawakami’s work takes aim at the social structures of class and gender. As in Breasts and Eggs, which explores reproductive autonomy, All the Lovers in the Night challenges societal strictures.
Elif Batuman
RaveThe Spectator (UK)Delightful ... Batuman has a formidable deadpan wit, and reading the book captures the university experience, with ample time for philosophising. Selin is not only an astute observer but displays a touching capacity for awe ... Some may wonder if the stakes are high enough in this campus novel. But for the young, what could possibly be more pressing than probing how one should live?
Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein
PositiveIrish Times (IRE)A rare peek behind the curtain of the creative process of one of our most elusive authors ... In the Margins is not a book on craft; I suspect it will hold limited interest for nonfans. But for those of us whose Ferrante fever runs high, it is nothing short of a thrill to have light shed on her magic.
Sheila Heti
MixedFinancial Times (UK)In her new novel Pure Colour, Heti continues to pose existential questions but returns to the form of the fable, albeit with a surreal twist ... The book is loosely plotted, with long philosophical digressions. But then Heti has never shown much interest in conventional literary devices ... Heti’s narrative voice employs a simple syntax. At its best, the result is beautiful: the repetitions and resonances in her alphabetised diary have a poetic effect. Her prose can be clunky ... She also has a penchant for provocation ... Prurience aside, the deliberately primitive quality of the book hovers perilously close to kitsch ... Heti is not, alas, the Virgil to guide us out of the dark wood ... Despite having recently lost my own father, the book’s meditations on grief left me cold. The closing lines suggest a framing device: the birds, fish and bears were a bedtime story the narrator’s father told her as a child. If only our adult anxieties were as easily allayed as in fairy tales.
Tessa Hadley
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Hadley has crafted an aesthetic that inspires trust, and the author’s free indirect style...allows us access to the characters’ inner lives. She is also a superb portraitist, rendering people with the tiniest of details ... Free Love is not, to my mind, the strongest of Hadley’s eight novels ... The denouement of Free Love, following the revelation of a family secret \'as fatally twisted as a Greek drama\', feels rushed. No matter: a sumptuous stylist, Hadley is a writer for whom language trumps all else. Any publication of hers, whether of short or long fiction, is cause for celebration for the pure pleasure of the prose.
Danielle Friedman
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Danielle Friedman shows the tremendous gains women have made in obtaining their right to exercise ... Well-researched and engaging, Let’s Get Physical shares the stories of the pioneers who pushed through barriers in women’s exercise ... Friedman addresses the dichotomy between beauty culture and exercising for wellbeing. And she reminds readers that for all of its feminist gains, fitness has been a bastion of privilege, accessible primarily to white women with the time and the resources to pursue it. In a moving final chapter, she highlights the contemporary pioneers working to make exercise more inclusive—of race, of body shape, and of income.
Sarah Moss
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)With Moss’s trademark attention to both the beauty and danger of the natural world, the moors come alive as almost another character ... Covering only a few hours, The Fell conveys not only Kate’s and Matt’s fears but the particular anxieties of the time: the precautions about touching surfaces, the financial stress of furlough, and the dread of denunciation by neighbours ... The book also captures what was lost—from missed celebrations to more everyday delights ... The Fell is a slim book covering a lot of ground. In unfussy prose, Moss seamlessly blends quotidian concerns ... For Moss, the idea of control over one’s life is itself a sign of privilege.
Hanya Yanagihara
PanThe Irish Times (IRE)The good—or bad—news, depending on whether you’re after a tearjerker, is that To Paradise leaves readers’ eyes dry ... The themes of To Paradise—pandemics, colonialism, unequal rights, the quest for compassion and care—are urgent, and the idea of an alternate America is all too real in a post-Trump era with Roe v Wade in jeopardy. For fiction to work, however, it has to transcend the ideas it aspires to represent. Unlike the precise rendering of the fictional Micronesian island in Yanagihara’s 2013 debut, The People in the Trees, the world-building in To Paradise feels laboured. The characters often act as mouthpieces for concepts, with exposition eliding emotion. Despite the plethora of pages accorded to their development, they remain, alas, as unachieved as the American dream.
Lily King
RaveFinancial TimesFans of King’s novels will find much to enjoy in the 10 short stories in her first collection, half of which are previously unpublished ... While certain contemporary novelists steer clear of affect, King dives into the emotional worlds of her characters whole-hog, her wry humour ensuring that tenderness never veers into sentimentality ... With their plot and character development, King’s stories remain novelistic. Indeed, it’s the longer works, which allow sufficient space for the subtleties of the push and pull of relationships, that are the most successful ... King joins authors including Sarah Hall and Megan Hunter in invoking magical realism for their heroines to avenge wrongs inflicted by men ... it is the exquisite attention with which King articulates all that roils inside us that secures her place in the contemporary canon.
Sarah Hall
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)... the pleasure of Hall’s prose — visceral, intimate — is a balm to our collective wound.
Mary Gaitskill
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... draws attention to the line – increasingly blurred – between fiction and nonfiction. Even an ardent Gaitskill fan must admit, however, that the whole, here, is less than the sum of its parts. The spliced texts are distracting, and Gaitskill’s commentary sheds little additional light on her oeuvre ... Just as taking scissors to magazines does not automatically make one Richard Hamilton, so too the art of the literary fragment, as exemplified by authors such as Renata Adler and Jenny Offill, is not a simple matter of choosing chunks of thematically linked work ... It doesn’t help that much of the material has been mined before ... falls a little flat.
Elizabeth Strout
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)What sets Strout’s work apart is her characterisation ... crafted such that a reader need not have read its predecessors to understand and enjoy it. Taken as an ensemble, the triptych offers a fuller portrait of Lucy Barton ... With its spotlight on her first marriage, Oh William! allows us to put another piece in the jigsaw with a satisfying click.
Jonathan Franzen
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)With Crossroads, his sixth novel, Franzen returns to a structure that has served him well: close third-person narratives that circle back to cover some of the same ground from varying points of view ... Like most of Franzen’s oeuvre, Crossroads could have been trimmed by a good hundred pages ... Crossroads is a better book than both Freedom and Purity ... While Franzen now steers clear of the \'fancy words\' that alienated some readers of his earlier work, his style can’t help but insist on its cleverness ... Still, when Franzen is good, he’s very, very good. And having invested 580 pages in the Hildebrandt clan, I can’t wait to see what they get up to next.
Joy Williams
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)Harrow’s dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author’s idiosyncratic stamp. With even less plot and narrative cohesion than usual, however, reading it can be disorienting, as characters float in and out of the story and the perspective shifts from first person to third, occasionally slipping back again ... it reminded me more of Jenny Offill’s fragmentary novel Weather—minable for glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom. Language is, of course, inadequate in the face of the abyss ... Unlike other contemporary climate novels, Harrow does not offer a warning and little in the way of hope.
Maggie Nelson
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Although art, sexual freedom and drugs are more natural subject areas for Nelson, the section on climate change is, to my mind, the most edifying ... Part of what makes her writing so compelling is a comfort with uncertainty ... It is a delight to spend time with Nelson’s erudite mind. She admits, however, that On Freedom is \'littered to a fault\' with quotations. At its best, the effect is of being privy to an engaging conversation, but at times the citations feel poorly integrated. Nelson’s prose sings most when the critical theory is grounded in personal experience.
Deborah Levy
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksOne of the pleasures of this volume is Levy’s relating to her daughters as adults ... Levy’s wry humor and attention to the art of living make her good company on the page, with wisdom weaved in from her touchstone authors, including James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, and Leonora Carrington. At a time when the pandemic restricted travel, I appreciated the armchair travel on offer in Real Estate: I could taste the guava ice cream with salt and chili powder in Mumbai and feel the chill of December sleet at a café in Berlin ... stays on safe — if scenic — ground.
Kristen Radtke
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)Radtke weaves together snippets of scientific research, pop culture and memoir with her own evocative artwork. Forgoing the panel format typical to graphic novels in favour of one or two-page spreads, she captures the architecture of aloneness and the protective postures our bodies assume in shared spaces ... Radtke draws an important distinction between solitude and feeling lonely ... doesn’t so much suggest solutions as the salve of solidarity.
Brandon Taylor
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)The seemingly civilised setting of a midwestern college town allows Taylor to illuminate internal states of unrest ... Redolent of the work of Garth Greenwell and Bryan Washington, Taylor is also a master craftsman of sex scenes, with all of their attendant awkwardness. He deftly explores those strange bedfellows of tenderness and violence and the ever-changing geometries between people ... The stories in Filthy Animals, some of which have appeared in publications including American Short Fiction and Guernica, are more tautly composed than Real Life, which was written in a five-week sprint ... Taylor’s characters are sincere without being sentimental – their pain too palpable to perform the cool detachment in vogue among his cohort. The agency he affords them provides dramatic tension and is a refreshing counterpoint to the passive ennui increasingly prevalent in contemporary fiction.
Nuala O'Connor
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Joycean Dublin is well-trodden ground, not least by Edna O’Brien, but O’Connor keeps the story fresh with the vivid language of her fictionalised biography. A chambermaid from Galway, Nora’s voice is frank and earthy ... O’Connor deftly depicts the strength of Nora’s attachment to an adoring but exasperatingly unreliable man ... Whether Nora directly influenced Joyce’s writing, as some scholars have argued, or was more of a muse, O’Connor’s fleshed-out \'little f**kbird\' is no adjunct.
Damon Galgut
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... electrifying ... free, indirect style...lends itself to irony, which Galgut further punctuates with moralising narrative interventions. The sly asides add levity, but also implicate the reader as a co-conspirator in the family’s failings ... The Promise has a decisively Joycean Dead end, with diluvian rain washing over the veld. Galgut refuses redemption, however, by likening the storm to \'some cheap redemptive symbol in a story, falling from a turbulent sky on to rich and poor, happy and unhappy alike.\'
Jhumpa Lahiri
PanFinancial Times (UK)Despite the novel’s picturesque setting, cosy armchair travel this is not. The narrator laments a life misspent and displays a certain surliness ... The book is so devoid of joy that I found myself startled by an exclamation mark, when friends wish the narrator \'good luck!\' as she agrees to take up a fellowship abroad ... Literary fiction can hold loneliness (as exemplified by the novels of Anita Brookner) and plotlessness (Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy springs to mind). Lahiri’s Italian, alas, is not yet capacious enough to carry off either. Unlike her works in English—which depict dislocation with an intimate precision—the prose in Whereabouts is spare but inexact, the translation intentionally retaining a rough edge ... her self-imposed exile limits rather than liberates.
Katherine Angel
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Angel uses snippets of contemporary culture to illustrate her arguments ... The problem with an over-emphasis on consent, she points out, is that it shifts the responsibility for societal imbalances of power onto individuals. Consent only works as a standard if one feels one has the right to refuse ... Armed now with the tools of consent and sex research, \'we are, yet again, in a moment in which it seems to be tomorrow … that sex will be good again,\' writes Angel. In her view, neither offers the emancipatory potential that their proponents would have us believe, as both underplay the contextual and emergent nature of desire.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... sweeping ... superbly translated ... More than just a family and cultural history, Stepanova’s meditations on the nature of memory place themselves on a continuum of Proust, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) and the work of WG Sebald ... Stepanova harbours no illusions about the feasibility of preserving the past.
Patricia Lockwood
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)No One Is Talking About This cleaves into two distinct parts. In the first, the unnamed protagonist – propelled to internet fame after tweeting “Can a dog be twins?” – meets fans on an international speaking tour. Two text messages from her mother cut the trip short ... Part two of No One Is Talking About This explores what happens when corporeal realities come to the fore ... The book lacks the visual aid of the slideshow accompanying the lecture and incorporated online in the London Review. The jokes struggle to land on their own and, alas, already feel dated ... By design, the first half of No One Is Talking About This recreates the sensation of too much time scrolling ... So, does the change of tack in the second half offer more sustenance? The baby’s caretaking is meant to be in sharp contrast to what Lockwood calls \'the portal\', although the story continues to be told in fragments ... Here the humour feels not brave but adolescent: on seeing her mother after receiving the devastating news, the protagonist’s first thought is that the last maternal text contained the spurting three droplets emoji ... While the baby’s world is rendered in detail, the characters of the baby’s parents and the shape of their grief remain impressionistic.
George Saunders
RaveFinancial Times (UK)Part intro to Russian literature, part musings on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is all pleasure ... It’s rich pickings ... Saunders’ commentary on the stories reads like the coffee-stained notes of a professor fond of the subject—and his students. Where the text sparkles in particular is in his attempts at articulating the mystery of the muse.
Bryan Washington
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)With exquisite attention to the ever-shifting spaces between people, Memorial deftly renders both grief and moments of quotidian joy, often in shared meals ... race, class and identity are addressed in an unforced way ... characters’ lack of self-involvement, despite the first-person narration, is a breath of fresh air ... Digital forms of communication are integrated seamlessly in a way that doesn’t grate.
Phil Klay
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)Klay clearly understands the complexities of the Colombian conflict ... He does not shy away from the brutalities of war ... In addition to such evocative imagery, Klay touchingly relays the difficulties of maintaining intimacy with civilians while deployed ... The unspooling of Klay’s exhaustive research can get exhausting, however. The first section drags, lacking the sniper focus of his short stories, particularly for Abel, whose story pulls heartstrings but whose character never feels fully formed ... While exposing the sprawling web of American counter-terrorist warfare is an admirable aim, musings on military policy placed in the mouths and minds of the characters are heavy-handed.
Shirley Hazzard
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)While the two posthumously-published pieces are, unsurprisingly, not fully developed, the voice is unmistakably Hazzard’s, containing her characteristically clever repartee ... Hazzard’s prose is marked by its precision; she took her vocation seriously, redrafting each page up to 30 times ... It’s not only an elevated register and omniscient asides that lend Hazzard’s oeuvre an air of formality but the bygone era of intellectualism she evokes, with cosmopolitan characters slipping into Italian or French and quoting poetry ... With an ear attuned to dialogue – both internal and external – Hazzard believed that speech \'can crucially suggest what is not said\'. Nestled in her characters’ exchanges are gut-punching aphorisms ... Carefully crafted and astutely observed.
Elena Ferrante
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Exquisitely translated, as ever, by Ann Goldstein, Ferrante masterfully evokes the agonies and insecurities of adolescence ... Like the face of an adolescent, The Lying Life of Adults is not flawless: the last line is somewhat wan compared with the bold strokes preceding it, and a talismanic heirloom bracelet used as a plot device is clunky in parts. But Ferrante has once again written a story meeting her own criterion for narrative, in which \'the facts of ordinary life – are extraordinarily gripping when read\'. I devoured it greedily, in big gulps ... For an author who has fabricated elements of her biography beyond the necessities of protecting her identity, truth may be less about an accurate representation of facts than forging a deeper emotional resonance.
Tori Amos
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)Only a handful of rock-star memoirs attract a wide audience outside of their fanbase, such as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One (2004) or Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010). Resistance is unlikely to enjoy such breakout success: the narrative can be hard to follow as Amos criss-crosses chronology, skipping, for example, from the Iran hostage crisis to Trump’s current immigration policies before circling back to 9/11 ... Her devoted fans, however, will no doubt relish the book’s release. Reading the backstory of her often-abstract lyrics recreates the bygone intimacy of studying liner notes to suss out meaning.
Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)... a seamless translation by Megan McDowell ... Schweblin enjoys hovering just above the normal. Inspired by Samuel Beckett, she is interested in exposing absurdities ... Little Eyes presents a plausible picture of unintended consequences from the surveillance by smart technology in our homes and our pockets.
Anne Enright
MixedFinancial Times (UK)Enright deftly depicts [Katherine\'s] assault and Norah’s self-recrimination in its aftermath ... The emotional core of Actress takes some time to emerge, as the narrative gets waylaid by a barrage of biographical detail ... If Actress lacks the robust characterisations of some of her other novels, it does leave you with things to think about: we come away considering complex gender dynamics in a more nuanced way.
Lily King
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)She paints a precise portrait of the dynamics of working in a restaurant as well as the world inhabited by Oscar’s children. She gently lampoons the literary scene, including the different ways in which men and women are treated ... Infused with tenderness and wry wit in equal measure, Writers & Lovers is King’s best book yet.
Rebecca Solnit
PositiveFinancial TimesOut of force of habit, perhaps, the book is more essayistic than biographical. While memoirists are often criticised for navel gazing, Solnit is more at ease depicting exterior landscapes. She paints a picture of a gentrifying San Francisco in broad strokes ... Solnit reiterates her confidence that culture can shape politics, pointing to the evolution in equal rights that she has witnessed in her lifetime.
Deirdre Bair
MixedThe Irish TimesWhat emerges instead of an addendum is a picture of the persistent sexism Bair encountered throughout her career ... Bair has a tendency to derail into detail, with a writing style that can charm but mostly grates. There’s a lack of rigour in Parisian Lives that is troubling from someone whose currency is accuracy: the book would have benefited from an index, and an assertion that Bair became a biographer when she was \'not yet thirty\' does not square with the dates. Still, as a glimpse of the art of biography in a bygone era, the book is not without its pleasures ... Most importantly, Parisian Lives serves simultaneously a reminder of how far women have and have not come.
Lydia Davis
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)\"What a pleasure...to linger longer within the mechanisms of Davis’s mind in this collection of her non-fiction work ... To read Davis is to be jolted out of complacency. One comes away from Essays optimistic that such hyperfocus can be honed ... At some 500 pages, Essays hasn’t quite the heft of Davis’s Collected Stories, which one critic reported using to jack a car to change a flat tyre. Even for the most hardcore of Davis devotees, however, the volume might have merited further culling. A handful of essays on visual artists, including a piece on her husband, the abstract painter Alan Cote, feel extraneous.
But that aside, Essays is a treasure trove of wisdom on the pleasures of reading and writing. I eagerly await bedding down with further reflections from Davis — on translation and learning languages — with the publication of volume two.
Zadie Smith
RaveThe Financial TimesIf only achieving Smith’s mastery was as easy as following the instructions on a class handout. An A+ to her for reaching the goals of stirring empathy (\'the aim and purpose of all stories, everywhere, always\') and of drawing in the reader. A few stories with a surreal bent play less to her strengths but, overall, Grand Union, had me feeling like a fourth-grader, lying \'upon the floor, reading delightedly from a book, lost in it completely\'.
Etgar Keret
RaveFinancial Times (UK)A grandmaster of the incongruous, Keret’s flights of fancy range from a dash of fantasy to the outright absurd ... The strongest stories are those that maintain some tether to reality, making the discrepancies between our expectations and the outrageous occurrences concocted by Keret all the funnier. His dips into dystopia...are less compelling. The whimsical scenarios belie a deeper gloom ... Keret has always conveyed an underlying awareness of mortality in his work. But Fly Already displays a particular gravitas: most of its protagonists are grieving, or alienated ... It’s Keret’s particular brand of brilliance that can simultaneously hold tragedy and comedy, and in such compact packages.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe Financial TimesIn Coventry...Cusk explains that her parents periodically withdraw contact without explanation. When her mother reaches out to reconnect after one such absence, Cusk decides not to re-engage, preferring to take up permanent residence in Coventry. It is from this place of exile that she observes the workings of the world ... As the themes of her autofiction and non-fiction converge, the essays also chip away at Cusk’s preoccupations — the tenuous agreements of civility, the tension between family life and the creative process, the making of a home — from multiple angles in order to chisel towards some sort of truth ... Perhaps in part in reaction to her parents’ silent treatment, as the language in her work becomes more streamlined, Cusk’s voice in Coventry resonates loud and clear.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
MixedFinancial Times... while Fleishman Is in Trouble holds up a mirror to Manhattanites practising \'self-care\' in athleisurewear, the portrait remains a still. Plot is propelled by desire, and it is difficult to determine here what the characters are after ... A glimmer of optimism at the end of the book reads more like resignation than redemption—unsurprising, perhaps, when the pathway out of a mid-life muddle is illuminated only by the dull, cold glow of a smartphone screen.
Kristen Roupenian
MixedFinancial TimesReaders looking to You Know You Want This for further insights into \'sex, dating, and modern life\' (as it says on the tin), however, may be disappointed to find that the majority of the stories involve a supernatural or macabre twist. When Roupenian stretches plausibility to provoke, as in the grisly denouement of the opening story, she loses her hold on our attention ... it is in rendering reality with fine brushstrokes, as in her depiction of the wavering line between attraction and repulsion in \'Cat Person,\' that Roupenian is at her best ... some of the collection — the bulk of which was written before Roupenian stepped into the spotlight — may have benefited from more time to incubate ... when Roupenian remains rooted in realism, she gives pause by exposing the sinister side of sexuality, and one looks forward to seeing what she might accomplish with the novel form.
Kate Devlin
PositiveFinancial Times\"... engaging ... While Devlin admits that there are ethical issues that will need to be ironed out... she is unequivocally upbeat about their potential.\
