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.
