PositiveThe Independent (UK)Thanks to Boel Westin\'s biography of Tove Jansson, with its detailed analyses of its subject\'s distinguished work, we can view the joyous springtime experiences of these hippopotamus-like creatures in historical and personal terms ... Since her death in 2001, Jansson\'s reputation has arguably rested as strongly on pared, magical prose for adult readers as on her children\'s stories. But Westin shows that this division is inappropriate; Tove\'s unique imagination and art pervade both.
Susan Bernofsky
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Bernofsky brings alive the brilliant Berlin world in which Karl – with Robert in his wake – moved ... Bernofsky makes us feel, too, Robert’s unease at much of this, especially the high-octane social life ... Bernofsky gives us a persuasive analysis of [Der Räuber] with its modernist shifting synthesis of narrator and central character ... [An] authoritative, moving biography.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
RaveThe Spectator (UK)Knausgaard employs his own literary artfulness to release a presentation of his young evolving self — in roughly chronological order, but expanding or foreshortening according to thematic demands — with an immediacy as astonishing as that of its two predecessors ... Karl Ove is eager for acceptance, even popularity and admiration, and the ebb and flow of his standing with the community’s children and of his own apprehension of this constitutes one of the novel’s most original features. The emerging pattern will, we feel, pertain even in an adulthood spent by choice in dissimilar milieus.
Alix Nathan
RaveLiterary Review (UK)...a powerful, imaginative novel ... Nathan\'s novel has something of the fable about it, and its unadorned prose aids the narrative drive so essential to this form ... It is Nathan\'s scrupulous objectivity that enables the complexity of her characters to emerge ... For all the grim logic of its horrifying finale, what distinguishes The Warlow Experiment above all is how Nathan—unlike Powyss—treats her subject with unfailing dignity and compassion.
