RaveThe Spectator (UK)The tight prose and descriptive range are remarkable ... There isn’t much room for redemption in this wise, immersive book: but there is always space for a bat-squeak of hope.
Rachel Kushner
RaveThe Spectator (UK)\"Rachel Kushner’s ambitious, intelligent and gripping latest novel, Creation Lake, concerns the eternal human capacity for delusion, while wondering whether utopian ideals can ever be realized without serious compromise. And it manages all this within the form of an expertly slick thriller, set against the backdrop of contemporary rural France, its history, politics and class system, all carefully woven in alongside an account of the rise and fall of the Neanderthals ... Expansive in its reach, fiercely uncompromising in its intellectual heft, yet as readable and enjoyable as a pacy spy thriller, Creation Lake is one of the best books of the year so far.\
Allen Bratton
PanThe Times Literary SupplementHal’s actions stem from the terrible fact that his father regularly sexually abused him ... This may be psychologically convincing, in terms of the behaviour of an abused person, but we never get under the skin of either the Duke of Lancaster’s motives or those of Hal ... Bratton often goes askew in attempting to depict the upper classes ... Perhaps more frustrating, despite owing its conception to the Henriad, Henry Henry doesn’t comment on, or really advance our understanding of, it ... In the end Henry Henry never emerges from beyond the shadows of what it seeks to emulate.
Kelly Link
MixedThe Spectator (UK)The plot is not the most interesting thing here. Those attuned to the mechanics of fantasy will guess what’s coming. Link, used to the short-story form, has overstretched a good idea and the latter parts of this long novel are on the thin side ... Yet the writing sparkles with wit and colour, and there is much camp weirdness and shimmering grandeur. Thousands of moths descend on the town; statues come to life; a hotel owner becomes a tiger, and there’s even a pink flying unicorn ‘in a snit’. This is entertaining fantasy and also, in its own way, experimental. Dancing lady, unicorn, happy face.
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Its major themes are guilt, complicity and the apparently inescapable cycles of grief arising from world-shaking events. It is gripping, well honed and very much aimed at adults .... Gretel’s smart, engaging and uncompromising voice draws the reader in deftly ... The novel is consummately constructed, humming with tension until past and present collide ... All the Broken Places is a defence of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist’s skill, precision and power.
Stephen King
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... has no sheen of fairy dust, but it does inspire both wonder and fear. It meshes the grammar of the fairy tale with that of small-town Americana and portal fantasies, adding in body horror and alien weirdness, under a monumental imaginative architecture. Like many fairy tales it critiques tyranny and homogeneity, and emphasizes the wit and intelligence of the weak against the strong. It is also a deeply literary novel, with a keen awareness both of itself and of its predecessors ... Stephen King’s thesis is plainly made: stories are constructed, section by section, from other stories; and that renders them all the more powerful.
Roddy Doyle
MixedFinancial Times (UK)The coincidences in the stories can feel overly engineered; it is perhaps inevitable when the canvas is so small and so constrained. Fiction, though of course concerned with interiority, thrives on incident and friction. The nature of the enclosed setting necessitates repetitive structures: like those bicycle wheels. We are in limbo, endlessly expecting. Yet whether the Covid crisis becomes an important, fertile ground for fiction remains to be seen.
Peter Stothard
RaveThe Spectator (UK)\" Stothard explores the familiar ground with fresh, engaging and learned eyes, displaying a novelist’s knack for redolent and evocative detail, from cicadas and lizards to the press and horror of battle ... The excitement and danger of the times are skilfully drawn ... There is a scarcity of biographical detail about the conspirators, and many of them are simply names, but Stothard weaves wonders from threads ... This book reminds us powerfully of the supreme importance of individual freedom against an overweening state; of being able to speak truth to those in authority. If the actions of the conspirators did not have the desired outcome, at least their cause was noble, and one that resonates widely today.
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Suzanne Collins
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Everything you would expect from Collins is here: fraught teenage love; plenty of violence; character names untethered from their contexts and a pervasive awareness of the power of media ... Whereas it was easy to root for Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the trilogy, as she battled her way through the Games, it’s harder to do the same for Coriolanus, watching safely from the sidelines ... The plot of the novel rests on deception and pretence, its view of humanity bleak; yet Collins’s themes of friendship, betrayal, authority and oppression, as well as the extra layers of lore about mockingjays and Capitol’s history, will please and thrill.
Joanna Kavenna
PositiveThe Financial Times... absorbing and timely ... There are hilarious moments ... Kavenna’s writing brims with manic energy, using relentless logic to show just how bizarre an algorithm can be. If the book has a fault, it’s that it presents this world as a fait accompli: it’s difficult to imagine that being imprisoned for a crime not yet committed would be met with little resistance. Zed plunges into potential extremes, and reminds us that in all our faults, we cannot be reduced to a series of 1s and 0s. At least, not yet.
André Aciman
PositiveThe Financial TimesThere are moments when reading the novel feels a bit like skimming through a very high-class travel brochure ... There are deeper themes running through the work, however ... Other novelists might have enjoyed untangling such a Freudian nightmare, but Aciman leaves it as it is ... Although the dialogue is stylised, there is a warmth and a humanity in Aciman’s prose that enraptures with its slow, easy embrace. Just don’t expect any easy answers, and certainly no happy-ever-after.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
PanThe New Humanist (UK)The problem is that Knausgaard’s unflinching honesty, so admired throughout Europe, leaves little room for characters to grow, for scenes to live. He is far too busy telling you exactly what he was given for supper as a child...or telling you what walk he’s been on...for anything to burst out of the page. It’s like someone reading out the telephone directory ... It is entirely possible that this novel is a masterpiece, and has just been badly served by a translation ... But I don’t think so. I pity the poor translator. After all, it must have been quite hard to translate something so soporific.
Stephen King
PositiveThe Independent (UK)If you are now thinking of the recent Netflix show Stranger Things, don’t forget that King got there first: he’s been writing about psychic children and conspiracies since the Sixties. There’s even a sense here that he’s having fun ... King is supreme at crafting the building blocks of a story and laying them together in a slick, teasing and apparently simple way. But there is also a wealth of political references ... If there is a fault here, it’s that this dizzying sense of encroaching chaos isn’t fully explored ... isn’t overly violent or shlocky, as some of King’s books can tend to be. In many ways, especially with Luke as its protagonist, it could almost be young adult fiction, particularly as it relies on the idea that children, when connected, are a powerful insurrectionary force. Nevertheless, there are deeply sinister scenes ... Everything you would expect from King is here ... While not his best, The Institute still hums and crackles with delicious unease.
Mark Haddon
RaveThe Independent (UK)\"Haddon’s glittering tapestry of a novel skilfully redeploys the structures of Pericles’ source material ... The sea is the strongest metaphor in the novel, surging and changing, providing life and death, and becoming an agent of the marvellous. Shakespeare’s late romances are all about those coincidences and supernatural effects which can seem, on stage and on the page, ridiculous. They do, however, indicate the agency of divine providence. In The Porpoise, Haddon gives voice to a character who, in Shakespeare, receives no more than a passing mention, and in doing so, shows the transcendent power of stories to heal and restore.\
Max Porter
RaveThe IndependentPorter writes exquisitely and vividly, carefully deploying tensions, with a fine ear for the myriad nuanced reactions and voices of those involved in the search. If the novel has a fault, it’s that it relies a little too heavily on the miraculous, and that its ending is a tad too complicit with the grammar of convention ... Yet, Lanny is a wonderful piece of work, resonant and uncanny, full of dreamy, quiet moments, reaching towards an engrossing, vivid climax. Attuned to our contemporary malaises, and with a classic sense of style, it marks Porter as a writer to watch.
Adam Foulds
RaveThe Specator (UK)An exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on obsession ... Foulds introduces a note of gentle satire, particularly in the overblown way that film people talk about their own essentially vainglorious projects, and in their convoluted complicity with regimes such as Qatar ... despite Henry’s many obvious flaws, Foulds frames him carefully, so that his story becomes urgent: he isn’t an empty-headed luvvie but someone engaged in that most modernist mission — the quest for himself. There’s an oddity about the timings of the plot — a letter delivered much later than I thought it had been — which lends the whole a dreamy sheen. Are we all dreaming? And what happens when we wake? ... Foulds is proving himself to be a versatile writer of intelligence and charm. Dream Sequence is a relatively slim affair; one finishes the book wishing the dream were longer.
Tessa Hadley
PositiveIndependentTessa Hadley’s compelling new novel, Late in the Day, is a subtle, delicate evocation of modern life ... As ever, Hadley\'s writing is precise yet mysterious ... a nuanced and supple account of how far-reaching historical events affect us all.
Philip Pullman
PositiveThe Financial TimesThe first part of the book moves at an expansive pace. Sometimes it feels as if we are not in a parallel universe at all, one example being a slightly jarring aside about public libraries ... Here Malcolm is set against an insane scientist with a three-legged hyena for a daemon, whose motivations are not quite sufficient enough to explain his actions, and consequently his presence doesn’t achieve the same level of threat as that provided by Mrs Coulter at her most sinister ... When the book reaches its second half, an urgent sense of excitement mounts, as Malcolm must contend with a terrible flood and undergo a frightening journey to safety. Pullman’s imagination is so enticing that any new window into it is welcome; and to connect once more with a fictional universe of such great power is a delight. Though La Belle Sauvage does not quite attain the fiery, magnificent heights of its predecessors, I’m certainly eager for the next two parts of this new trilogy; there are, after all, many more worlds to conquer.
