RaveThe Guardian (UK)This debut novel feels different. Madeleine Dunnigan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather scary protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness as involving as they are immediate. The writing is constantly surprising, as unafraid of sensuality as it is of the story’s repeated eruptions of brutality ... Dunnigan makes her story rich with larger implications, both personal and political ... Her sentences are wonderfully alive to physical fact ... This is an impressive and accomplished debut. Jean’s and his story will speak to any reader who is battling to understand themselves as the owner of a queer body in a treacherous world. It will also speak to anyone who can remember how glorious – and dangerous – it once felt to find yourself in possession of a fully functioning heart.
Edmund White
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... the Chinese boxes of White’s metafiction become ever more fantastically interlocked ... we can’t help but remember that it is White penning these pitiless descriptions of impotence and age, and it is perhaps in these truly hard to read passages that we glimpse the driving impulse behind the book. No matter how elaborately cultured or crudely pornographic the prose gets, it still crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry have as much to tell us about the dynamics of sex as the young and sated ... Back in the now-distant 1970s and 80s, White’s dazzling first quartet of novels forever enlarged what gay writing might do with its then newly found freedoms. With this latest report from the frontiers of desire, he has triumphantly dared to continue that project. A Previous Life is elegant, filthy – and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year.
Édouard Louis, Trans. by Michael Lucey
RaveThe Guardian\"This arresting autobiographical novel pulls no punches; rather, it lands them on the reader as frequently as fists descend on its subject ... So far, so grim. For anyone who thinks that in contemporary Europe the bad old days are far behind us for young people like Eddy, this is a salutary reminder of just how far from the truth that is ... However, the real achievement of the book is not its reportage, but its attitude. It is written entirely without self pity – and, astonishingly, without judgment ... There is no recoil from the facts, but no sentiment either. In the end, the writing-out of this intolerable childhood comes across as courageous, necessary and deeply touching.\
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe GuardianBy the end of this short, intense novel it becomes clear that the collision between our hard-won new capacity for frankness and a deep-rooted sense of archaic guilt and grief is precisely Greenwell’s subject.
