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Recent Reviews
Leila Mottley
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) ... striking ... socially incendiary ... This procedural plot provides narrative pull and a grim moral urgency. The captivating, distinctively voiced Kiara is a young black American who can shoot hoops and skateboard, but her literary antecedents are Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Victor Hugo’s Fantine and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth ... There are occasions when Mottley’s fluid, instinctive writing soars too high and becomes overwrought, or when her story veers a little close to melodrama. Yet mostly this feels like a remarkable debut, one that holds an illuminating if unflattering mirror to modern America ... It is exciting to wonder what might lie ahead for this writer, who turns 20 the same week she becomes a published novelist.
Bonnie Garmus
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) ...sparky ... Garmus’s earlier career as a copywriter specialising in technology serves her well. Here, scientific theory becomes sparkling, sprightly entertainment. A delight of her rip-roaring, funny book is how it bonds familiar plot and character elements with the unexpectedly unconventional ... Garmus is strong on pithy observation. And stronger still on fully formed, loveable characters. There is admittedly quite a lot of whimsy (overblown character backgrounds, a preternaturally intelligent daughter and dog, unlikely connections). However, the pace never slackens enough for this to become irksome ... The result is a smart, funny, big-hearted debut combining chemical elements into what seems a winning formula — one whose breakneck pace and gently ironic tone should appeal to readers of literary-commercial hits by American authors such as Katherine Heiny, Emma Straub and Curtis Sittenfeld, or, nearer to home, Lissa Evans and Nina Stibbe.
Marian Keyes
Rave Sunday Times (UK) Keyes has earned the adulation. Her witty, warm, sharply observant books have brought company and comfort to millions, without swerving the mess of life or writing off ageing women ... Newcomers should start with its predecessor. For existing fans, this garrulous, fast-paced read offers the joy of a reunion with not just Rachel, but the rambunctious Walsh clan (Claire, contemplating swinging; hard-edged Helen showing her softness) still crazy, gag-slinging and fizzing with craic after all these years. A tad overlong, but an entertaining, growingly poignant contemporary tale.
Nina De Gramont
Mixed Sunday Times (UK) De Gramont’s novel...begins with verve. A vivid Agatha Christie, dropping in at her husband’s London office, discovers another woman there, and instead of causing a scene, takes her to lunch at Simpson’s. A delicate powerplay ensues, which for the novel’s first quarter drives a taut, atmospheric story ... Then, the tension slackens. Agatha, the most charismatic character, disappears; Nan and a histrionic backstory involving sadistic Irish Catholics are foregrounded. De Gramont plays fast and loose with the facts to bolster a pappy Oirish marriage-wrecker motive story. Hercule Poirot might have surmised this backstory in seconds; here, it becomes chapters of subplot, fatally unbalancing a promising premise. The reader will emerge more confused than enlightened about Christie’s disappearance.
Alice Hoffman
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) This page-turning Atlantic-crossing caper is, above all, a paean to family love ... With QAnon, modern America is again in a grip of witch-fever. But these fast fairytales for grown-ups are full of enchanting comfort — more escapist cure than curse.
Dolly Alderton
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) There are sharply skewered set pieces, but also tender observations ... Unlike much commercial fiction, Ghosts admirably eschews overneat plotting or too-pat conclusions. This open-endedness may, however, dent its narrative drive. Or perhaps this is due to the resilience of Nina as a character, who falters, but never seems at any real risk of flailing — she is always the coolest observer in the room ... A wiser, if hardly wizened, fictional companion to Alderton’s millennial memoir, this is a promising, deftly written, often entertaining and poignant debut novel.
Miranda Cowley Heller
Positive The Times (UK) This is a novel of sensations — some painfully sharp ... Beneath the glittering surface of these lives swirl suppressed horrors, trauma and sexual deviancy. Elle and Jonah are bound by childhood summers together, but also a dreadful secret. Elle, her sister, Anna, and their mother, Wallace, are products of damaging divorces and dangerous remarriages ... The romantic dilemma that propels the narrative is less compelling than the novel’s deft characterisations, tangle of family ties and, most memorably, its earthy, intoxicating, shimmering sense of place.
Rahul Raina
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) ... it is his depiction of bustling, hustling Delhi and its grafting populace that makes this tightly written, fast-paced, often sharply savage societal satire such a rollicking read. [Raina] conjures up a memorable world that is ghee-greased, polluted, mired in dust and corruption, but also thrusting. At times his punchy sentences overreach and the rollercoaster action flags towards the end. Still, it’s an impressively entertaining but also insightful debut. The future probably belongs to the Rudis but the reader will root for Ramesh.
Zakiya Dalila Harris
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) Beyond [Nella] there are other, not wholly successful or satisfactorily resolved narrative threads ... For all that, The Other Black Girl is a fast-paced, vivid, thought-provoking ride, skewering — often wincingly — white liberal anxieties. If it makes readers laugh, however, it may be hollowly.
Gill Hornby
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) ...[a] bittersweet, gently persuasive novel ... Focusing on Cassandra...feels original, and allows this softer, diligent sibling to be the foil to a more showily clever, sharp-edged and volatile sister ... a sometimes poignant, softly paced book that makes a steady heroine of a wise spinster who, when first seen, seems as pitiable as Miss Bates does in Austen’s Emma to the thoughtless Emma Woodhouse. Without romanticising its period setting or underplaying the precariousness of any woman’s position in this society, it celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty.
Niklas Natt Och Dag
Positive The Times Already a prize-winning bestseller in Sweden, the grisly but moral literary page-turner is set to be published in 31 countries ... Even for its author, the book resists categorisation ... no more a straightforward detective novel than Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of Natt och Dag’s favourite tales ... the latest novel to offer the rich mix of a heightened historical background and the core mechanisms of a mystery story.
Jodi Picoult
Mixed The Times UK Her 25th novel, A Spark of Light, bravely addresses one of America’s most polarising issues: abortion. In illiberal Mississippi, where abortion is now banned beyond 15 weeks, Picoult imagines the armed siege of a clinic ... Picoult begins right in the middle of things, and offers a panoramic sweep and vivid characterisation. But her unfortunate decision to unfold her vital story backwards slackens the pace, then creates a further narrative problem because she needs an epilogue.