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Recent Reviews
Yangsze Choo
Rave New York Journal of Books Snow and Bao are both memorable characters, and the author has no difficulty making them believable in this rich setting. Part love story, part adventure, and part mystery, The Fox Wife is an enjoyable excursion into the beliefs and life in the China of 120 years ago.
Fatin Abbas
Rave New York Journal of Books Abbas has drawn a rich and believable cast of characters, and we feel sympathy and involvement with them all. William’s gentle love story across race and religion with Layla is both charming and apparently doomed as the war creeps closer. Mustafa is unforgettable, an eleven year old fighting for a life in a world of largely hostile adults—sleeping in a tree to avoid petty thieves and pedophiles. Alex and Dena start with an almost disdainful outsider’s view of Saraaya, but they too become sucked into the fate of the local people as the tensions flare ... Abbas adds just the right amount of sense of place to paint the scene and the cultures without letting it get in the way of her characters and their stories. Ghost Season is a wonderful debut from a truly talented writer. This is an author to watch and, above all, to read.
S.A. Cosby
Rave New York Journal of Books Razorblade Tears is an edge-of-the seat thriller, but the vivid dialogue, the relationship that develops between the two men against the odds, and the social commentary embedded in the story, make this also a top-notch literary novel. If one wants to be picky, one could say that a couple of the plot devices seem familiar from Blacktop Wasteland, but so what? They work here, too. Buddy and Ike are gripping characters you won’t forget for a long time. This is one of the best thrillers of the year.
Yasmina Khadra, tr. John Cullen
Mixed The New York Journal of Books Although described as a thriller, the story moves along inexorably at its own pace toward Khalil’s desired conclusion. Now he has the opportunity to strike back at the Moroccan upper crust who have targeted his brotherhood, and to die gloriously in the service of his God. The ending has a twist, but it doesn’t really feel right ... There is much to like about this novel. It’s well worth reading for the fluent writing and the strong, memorable characters alone. While we can’t like Khalil, or even sympathize with him, we come to pity and to some extent understand him. The flaws lie in the plot where contrivances seem to address the author’s needs rather than those of the story. Perhaps Khadra’s previous acclaimed works set the bar too high for this one.
Will Staples
Positive New York Journal of Books Animals is not light reading, but the writing is strong and the characters and story believable. It should be required reading for anyone who thinks animal trafficking isn’t serious. As if Covid hadn’t already taught us that lesson . . .
John Banville
Rave The New York Journal of Books Tongue in cheek, Banville introduces us to a cast of clichéd characters from an Agatha Christie novel ... Yet these are not actors. These are real people, much deeper than their caricatures suggest ... enjoy the complex characters drawn with beautiful prose and flashes of humor.
Deon Meyer
Rave The New York Journal of Books ... actually two books in one. It’s a tense assassination thriller set in France, and it’s an intriguing police procedural set in South Africa. Although the two stories develop independently, both are different aspects of the same plot and they come together at the end in an unexpected and satisfying way ... The Griessel section of the story would be worth the price of admission on its own...But Daniel Darret’s story also grabs us ... Weaving two apparently independent stories together, keeping the tension ramping in both, and bringing them to a simultaneous climax, is a challenging undertaking. Meyer pulls it off seemingly effortlessly. He’s that good ... A final note: the translation is excellent. You wouldn’t guess that the book was originally written in Afrikaans.
Sarah Lotz
Positive New York Journal of Books Missing Person is a character driven novel; don’t expect to be on the edge of your seat for the 470 pages ... Lotz has written a thoughtful thriller that is as much about the psychology of people who hide in various ways than about catching a murderer. The Internet is front and center, but this book is about the people.
Tash Aw
Positive The New York Journal of Books The novel has a strong sense of place, but more important is its powerful sense of culture. Tash Aw reveals both with tight prose ... We’re shown the way people live and how they survive—those that do. Tash Aw pulls no punches.