RaveThe Observer\"May We Feed the King is lyrical and rich, but despite its poetic chapter titles and artistic observations, it bears the marks of a novelist’s intricate plotting and sense of pace ... Perry captures the players of the court and the chain of gossip so successfully it feels as though we are observing history as it plays out. But what the book has to say about whether we can trust historical texts and records, and the propaganda they might inadvertently contain, is far more interesting.\
MixedThe Observer\"The earlier Steinem, unflinching and dogged, can still be found in her new memoir ... We dearly need the guts and guile of Steinem’s younger self in our present day reality. But it is there that An Unexpected Life falls short. There are few mentions of Donald Trump, elected and re-elected since her last memoir, despite the dark moment his presidency has ushered in for women. In the book, Steinem seems unwilling to confront the messy and complex state of modern womanhood ... Sixty years after Bellow’s advice to her, it seems that Steinem has fallen victim to that temptation to be exemplary, too often stepping carefully where you hope she might instead tread boldly ... There may never be another Gloria Steinem, but her memoir holds on to the hope that something better can still come...By invoking the language of radical activism but without offering any truly radical suggestions, Steinem’s farewell message feels sadly like a stirring call for blind faith amid the dark.\
Rumaan Alam
RaveEsquire... an exacting and dread-inducing story of suspicion, prejudice and hysteria, which unfolds like watching a play confined to a claustrophobic and sinister house ... Alam wrote the novel before the pandemic hit, and yet it feels so entwined with the DNA of 2020, capturing the hallucinatory quality which time takes on when stuck inside not knowing what the future holds ... gives a fascinating dissection of the diminishing white middle class ... a novel which has a cinematic quality to it, with the story bracing you for a jump scare with every rustling tree or squeaking door, conjuring the same creepiness as Jordan Peele\'s Us in which a holiday home is the setting for an invasion ... While Leave The World Behind nudges you towards the end of days, it knows true terror lies in the quiet wait for bad news as you ask again and again: what is going on?
Jia Tolentino
PositiveEsquireThe nine long-form essays don\'t have one single theme that binds them together, but often they present modern life as a con — a funhouse mirror that distorts and hides the truth ... The internet being terrible is a well trodden subject in non-fiction, but Tolentino is an expert on the topic, and she\'s at her best while dismantling online culture ... Finishing Trick Mirror has a disorientating feeling that stays with you, a low-level panic which is pinned down by the knowledge that attempts to change any of this are akin to rebuilding a house with the same old bricks.
