RaveIrish Times (IRE)Endlessly fascinating ... Overwhelmingly a western history. Much, then, remains to be written about the books that circulate around the globe - but for now, Pettegree has reminded us of their frontline position in a world of perpetual conflict.
Sarah Bernstein
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Singular and terrifying ... This compelling book serves as a powerful castigation of those who would draw the lines of society and communal identity so as to narrow diversity, and to punish those who dare to be different.
Andrew Miller
PositiveIrish Times (IRE)Miller is always an elegant writer, but the graceful tone of this novel jars with what we know of the narrator ... In demonstrating that performative empathy is ultimately an exercise in vapidity, Andrew Miller places a deeply disturbing truth at the heart of this troubling novel.
Gavin McCrea
PositiveIrish Times (IRE)Compendious and surprising ... A novel steeped in theatricality ... McCrea evokes older cultural echoes to good effect ... George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas on the political relevance of art shadow The Sisters Mao – if not always to best effect: as Shavian characters have something of a fondness for political monologue, so too do figures in this novel tend towards loquacity. This is perhaps inevitable in a novel of such scale: with a weight of material to sift and illuminate, a degree of sagging must occur ... The China that emerges from the pages of The Sisters Mao is rather a stage upon which politics and cultural identity are explored with respect and insight. The historical Madame Mao was an arresting and complex figure: and the fictional Jiang of this novel is likewise a creation of some stature, and an indicator of the earnestness that McCrea has brought to the fraught task of cultural borrowing. That the English sisters are rather less compelling characters is perhaps the point ... In the world of The Sisters Mao, as in life itself, ideas flow ceaselessly and impact in ways unexpected and uncontrollable – and this conception of the world brings with it a degree of comfort, as well as fear.
Roy Flechner
RaveThe Irish Times[An] absorbing investigation into the lives and afterlives of Ireland’s patron saint ... The deep historical shadows pooling around Patrick become in themselves a focus of interest: and, by taking each point of doubt and confusion, and broadening its context generously, [Flechner] turns what might have been a maddening exercise in guesswork into a fascinating and enlightening exploration of early Christian Ireland, Britain and Europe ... Flechner creates a compelling portrait of a society under immense strain ... Flechner is similarly crisp in his analysis of the Ireland in which Patrick was ministering so cannily ... This book is at its most vivid, maybe, as it traces the utility of the saint in more recent times[.]
