RaveiNews (UK)A much slimmer, tauter book, but occupies a similar world [as Hurrican Season]. Here, though, the climax – another brutal act – happens not at the start but at the end, and we know from the opening pages who does it and why ... Paradais has the intensity of a short story, and it might seem like the escalation of events is too extreme to be truly believable.But Melchor’s prose, in Sophie Hughes’s virtuosic translation, is so potent that the story’s pace never feels outlandish ... The ferocity of the novel – and, be warned, it is a queasy read – may invite accusations of gratuitousness, but everything in it is channelled so impeccably through the minds of these two young men that the climax feels less like cartoonish horror than the logical endpoint ... Melchor – surely one of the most talented and innovative novelists around – finds nuance in the depraved and the unforgivable.
Sarah Hall
Positivei (UK)Hall’s writing tends to operate at two extremes, the richly allusive and the grotesquely visceral, often in the same sentence ... At times, Burntcoat feels like a bundle of short stories, with sustained, coherent narrative generally shunned in favour of episodic narration, fleeting impressions and vignettes, moving between different periods of Edith’s life ... There is, as you might expect in a novel about two new lovers locked up together, a lot of sex. The writing is oddly uneven: some of it is cheesy...but some of it is wonderfully graphic, in a way that resembles Hall’s descriptions of sickness later on in the novel ... \'Do stories make sense of a disordered world?\' Edith asks early on in the novel. Burntcoat is an engrossing novel that tries admirably, at times brilliantly, to answer that question.
Sarah Hall
PositiveiNews (UK)Hall’s writing tends to operate at two extremes, the richly allusive and the grotesquely visceral, often in the same sentence ... At times, Burntcoat feels like a bundle of short stories, with sustained, coherent narrative generally shunned in favour of episodic narration, fleeting impressions and vignettes, moving between different periods of Edith’s life ... There is, as you might expect in a novel about two new lovers locked up together, a lot of sex...The writing is oddly uneven: some of it is cheesy, but some of it is wonderfully graphic, in a way that resembles Hall’s descriptions of sickness later on in the novel ... It is a bold thing to write a work of literary fiction about an ongoing catastrophe, even if some details have been changed ... \'Do stories make sense of a disordered world?\' Edith asks early on in the novel. Burntcoat is an engrossing novel that tries admirably, at times brilliantly, to answer that question.
Brandon Taylor
MixediNews (UK)If there was an emotion that summed up Real Life, it was ennui; Filthy Animals is a generally grimmer, more violent book ... Yet it is perhaps down to the consistent brilliance of Lionel’s narrative that apart from \'Anne of Cleves\' – a tender story about Marta, who, having left her husband, begins tentatively dating a woman – the rest of this collection feels anaemic ... Too often Taylor chooses a shocking event – someone dying or an unspeakable act of violence, say – when really he is at his best when writing moments of charged understatement, where tension builds to a point where the smallest movement or word feels earth-shattering ... The story of Lionel would make an excellent novella, and there it is, just waiting to be cut away from the mostly inconsequential tales that pad out this book.
Fiona Mozley
MixediNews (UK)Hot Stew is interested in property and wealth. Unfortunately, it is a little ham-fisted. The brothel is depicted as a quaint bastion of old Soho, while Agatha’s villainy is signposted, or rather billboarded, through lazy stereotypes ... Mozley’s discussion of sex work is more intriguing ... this sharp social commentary rubs up against a series of storylines that vary from the limp to the crass ... What could be an insightful exploration of London’s homelessness conundrum instead shows them as members of a gaggle of vagrants who gather underground and root through the earth for trinkets ... a bolshy, readable, and sometimes astute novel, but ultimately its mode of relentless caricature simply bounces off the real place without leaving a dent. My daily eight-minute walk from Oxford Circus to my workplace in Soho takes me past four artisan coffee shops, three Prets, an alleyway of sex shops, shiny office blocks and a house where the Venetian painter Canaletto once lived. Soho is strange and multifarious enough as it is; I’m not sure we need this souped-up take on it.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, trans. by Michele Hutchison
RaveLiterary Review (UK)... astoundingly accomplished ... This is recognisably a poet’s novel: atmosphere (of the bleak and disturbing variety) is favoured over action and the world is interpreted through evocative, imaginative similes and metaphors ... a stunning novel that does what a child’s-eye narrative should do: reveal that, in the face of adult folly, a ten-year-old can show us the world as it really is.
