RaveThe Observer (UK)Well-aimed ... Through this roving narration, Hamya gently teases out chasms and contradictions between each character’s memories ... With this artful construct, Hamya sets the stage for generational gripes and grudges to run riot ... Hamya is exacting in her use of flint-sharp images.
Sarah Bernstein
RaveThe Observer (UK)Bernstein paints from a palette of dread ... Little actually happens, but, mirroring the protagonist’s daily ramblings through the woods, the novel is made up of philosophical, sometimes rhapsodic meanderings logged in meticulous, measured prose ... This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite.
Henry Hoke
MixedThe Observer (UK)Set down in verse-like, relentless prose, the lion’s own voice is guileless, almost childlike, reflecting his own unfamiliarity with the world ... Shows how an animal’s fortunes can hinge on humanity and make creatures more like us. It’s just a shame that, constrained by his narrator, Hoke’s vast terrain isn’t fully explored.
Dizz Tate
PositiveThe Observer (UK)In this slippery debut where much is difficult to pin down, Tate acutely captures the precariousness of girlhood, its growing pains and what it is to be \'born out of rage\'.
Maddie Mortimer
PositiveiNews (UK)... bracing ... The book is inspired by the experience of Mortimer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010, and the dynamics of this family under unthinkable strain are carefully rendered ... Though the plot occasionally borders on the melodramatic, Mortimer has produced a contemplative reflection on what it is to be perceived from behind \'walls of skin\', whether actions have embodied consequences, and the incomprehensibility of suffering ... It may move between different styles and moods, but underpinning it all is the book’s bursting energy and, in the face of death, its verve for life.
Julia May Jonas
MixedThe Guardian (UK)... peppered with subversions of this kind, from the narrator’s early assertion that \'perhaps I am an old man more than I am an oldish white woman\', since she is compelled by desire, to the introduction of her adult, androgynous, bisexual daughter Sid, emancipated from \'the heterosexual prison\'. Yet Jonas portrays a world in which women, despite attempts to unshackle themselves, trip into knotty and constricting gender norms: though priding herself on an \'unconventional/ marriage, the narrator is engulfed by domestic labour, while it is her own body, not Vladimir’s, and its faults with which she is preoccupied ... Arguments of female agency, sex positivity and what constitutes true trauma are wrung dry – it is the topic of female pain and its fetishisation in art, however, which Jonas illuminates. Among the novel’s most disturbing passages are the narrator’s recollected encounters with predatory professors and family friends, dismissed as little more than embarrassing ... With its fervent \'embrace\' of \'the I I I\', its understated mundanity and poised restraint, Jonas’s debut joins a swath of authors with nameless protagonists, among them Rachel Cusk and Amina Cain, and their interrogation of the female canon ... what lets this intelligent, knowing portrayal of a woman’s spiralling midlife crisis down is that the questions it seeks to answer are not as morally dubious as it seems to claim. The much-overstated 15-year age gap between Vladimir and the narrator is characteristic of the novel’s concern about age-related power dynamics; Vladimir is snagged on whether the assumption that young women cannot consent to relationships with older men is anti-feminist, though its stilted attempt to give the title of victim or oppressor to each is where the novel loses its footing.
Claire-Louise Bennett
RaveiNews (UK)Written with a rich and ruminative humour, Checkout 19 shares similar experimental stream-of-consciousness narration with Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch. It joins the legion of \'unnamed female narrator\' fiction—which counts Rachel Cusk, Amina Cain and Jo Hamya among its ranks—but is also a potent and enraptured counter to the poised and detached tone of much of the genre ... Checkout 19 masterfully captures the delicateness of relationships ... Bennett swaps the first person for a chorus-like plural to bring the novel to a symphonic close. This is a book that is meant to be read backwards as much as forwards—turning back the pages, fishing for jewels missed the first time around.
Seong-Nan Ha, Trans. by Janet Hong
PositiveiNewsThese stories act as acute reminders of how our supposedly normal lives can quickly become much stranger ... \'Bluebeard’s First Wife\' shreds the illusion of a picture-perfect life, but less compellingly and, unlike her other stories, it teeters on the edge of melodrama. In Ha’s best stories, secrets stay unrevealed ... seriously impressive. The winner of multiple prestigious Korean literary awards and acclaimed by authors such as Nazanine Hozar and Susan Choi, Ha is known for being a master of description and reading her stories is often akin to being plunged into an otherworld. Crystalline images and motifs, expertly captured by translator Janet Hong, glisten under the surface ... Ha’s writing still manages to be topical, especially in pushing against the constraints of society. She spins out unnerving tales that touch on LGBT issues, sexual assault and suicide. If anything, Ha’s stories feel even more pertinent now.
