MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIn short chapters marked by riverine sentences and blunt self-reproach...both of which are compelled by his imaginative trespass into other people’s experiences, Wideman reveals the slaveroad’s presence in his own life and in the world ... A late chapter, is far stronger if uneven. Here, Wideman imagines from a variety of perspectives his son Jacob’s ongoing imprisonment for murdering a fellow teenage camper in 1986. The story is raw, affecting and unsettling in the main, but ends with a graphic sexualized fantasy that comes across as inchoately performative. Indeed, when Wideman doesn’t indulge in showy provocation or hyper self-consciousness, he tells and retells powerful, miry tales in Slaveroad that are incantatory, transporting and incendiary.
Richard Powers
RaveThe AtlanticConfident ... Told in two ways that feel by turns overlong and undercooked—until they add up to something unexpected and genuinely fascinating ... If this all sounds like fantasy fiction for rich white people, that’s because it is. I’m not being a crank here, whining again about how Powers falls short of the great American masters of marine-life metaphors. I’m pointing, in fact, to a revelation near the very end of the novel, which discloses its stunning conceit ... Ingenious tricks and clever devices abound in Powers’s fiction, but never before with the provocative implications of the turn in Playground.
Andrew O'Hagan
RaveThe AtlanticDarkly and often brilliantly alive to the current state of Great Britain ... O’Hagan deftly deploys Flynn as a variously knowing, unwitting, and selectively ignorant nexus for contemporary Britain’s many moving parts and players ... Caledonian Road is a superb state-of-the-nation novel, the finest in many years, but what finally matters is its efficacious literary genealogy.
Manya Wilkinson
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWith its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages ... Despite the novel’s fable-like textures, Wilkinson places it firmly in a historical time and place.
Tananarive Due
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewEmotive and eschews realism for the supernatural. It combines current concerns about race and justice for young Black men with an intensely readable, immersive story with decisive paranormal features. In fact, the novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work. I couldn’t stop reading. I needed to find out what was going to happen next, and next, and next ... A supernatural historical novel and a straight-up page-turner. This is a difficult combination to sustain for nearly 600 pages, but Due accomplishes it, and in so doing invites us to consider what it means to be enthralled, even entertained, by a young man’s ethical dilemmas, and to find ourselves unexpectedly rooting for revenge, for the living and the dead.
Jeffery Renard Allen
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAllen, whose writings seem to reach us from the darker side of the moon ...In Allen’s fashioning, Black experience is never subject to conventional parameters of time and space, and his magic realism, instead of being performatively exuberant or purposefully provocative, is plainly unsettling and disturbing ... These are difficult, inventive stories that, at their best, occupy a range of frequencies and otherworldly places.
Yan Lianke, trans. by Carlos Rojas
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewAs an idea and premise, and also as explained in engaging afterwords by Yan and his translator, Carlos Rojas, is darkly exhilarating and daring. But aside from a few intense and unexpectedly moving sequences...the novel itself is numb. The storytelling is slack...while nowhere is there anything like either the rage or artfulness to be found in novels by Yan’s contemporaries Ma Jian and Mo Yan.
Shehan Karunatilaka
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBy striking contrast, and even if the title promises book-club exotica, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is preternaturally irreverent about the manifold brutalities in Sri Lanka during its 26-year civil war ... Karunatilaka’s novel breaks with conventional modes of storytelling to reveal humanness in a strange, sprawling, tragic situation ... Karunatilaka’s book is supremely confident in its literary heterodoxy, and likewise in offering idiosyncratic particularities of ordinary Sri Lankan life well beyond the serious matters of politics, history, religion and mythology ... But readers everywhere will find in such demanding specificity what we all seek from great books: the exciting if overwhelming fullness of an otherwise unknown world told on its own terms, and that frisson of unexpected identification and understanding that comes from working to stay in it.
Lan Samantha Chang
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)... brawny ... smart and entertaining ... The allure, and challenge, of The Family Chao is in balancing its debt to Dostoevsky with saying something fresh about family and immigrant life ... while the novel includes some nominal religious material, there’s no equivalent to the catalytic struggles with faith itself, and with guilt and temptation before God and the Devil, that course through Karamazov. In their place is a great deal of self- and sibling psychologising, which might become tedious were it not for Chang’s superb feinting and clue-dropping about who finally turns out to be the Chao-killing Chao.
Laurent Bienet tr. Sam Taylor
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... attests to [Binet\'s] status as one of the most intellectually game writers of our time ... Deploying the dutifully admiring voice and stilted, decorous style of an unnamed historical chronicler, Binet recounts court intrigues, diplomatic negotiations, religio-political conflicts, military expeditions, major battles, alliances made and broken through money and marriage and regencies, and also the expenses and problems of governing ever more land and people ... If Binet played around with literary forms, genres and voices in his earlier fiction, here he and his translator, Sam Taylor, adopt them more straightforwardly, to balance out his imaginative incursion against history itself, even if this means the book can often be boring. This is a defiant, purposeful, unapologetic kind of boring. The very nature of a comprehensive chronicle of large-scale geographic, political, financial, religious and lineal conniving and convolution is necessarily complicated and dry, whether as history or counterhistory ... Fortunately, Binet’s historical feints afford imaginative frissons and relief from paragraph after paragraph of dutiful play-by-play about an empire in the making ... after 300 pages, the counterhistorical starts to lose its charge, more predictable than provocative ... Binet proves, however, more than only a Borgesian magician. As much is evident, for instance, in the letters Atahualpa exchanges with Higuénamota while the Mexicans are advancing across France and the emperor is losing battles and allies fast. They write with the high tone and reserved style befitting both their stations and Binet’s unstinting devotion to form and genre, but greater feeling nevertheless emerges. It’s the feeling two people have when they have gone through much together, only to discover that they are suddenly, decisively living through history — on the losing side.
Ruth Ozeki
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)... an often moving story about two people struggling over the unexpected loss of a third. It’s also an ostentatious self-commentary about how we tell and receive stories through books ... All of this would make for a convoluted story made nevertheless engaging by the unapologetic earnestness of Ozeki’s treatment of her characters’ struggles. But Ozeki isn’t interested in just telling a story. The novel’s conventional segments are interleaved with monologues by Benny and by the book itself, in the voices — respectively — of a snarky and questioning teen with low self-esteem and an empathetic, encouraging therapist with immense self-esteem ... The author sets high standards for this conceptual daring, with repeated quoting and riffing on Walter Benjamin’s writing about books and libraries, and on Borges’s ideated puzzle-making with identity and story. But such signalling and citation only expose the cloying banality of Ozeki’s own claims and insights, which include adolescent bibliophile profundities ... Ozeki has considerable storytelling energies; these were evident and rightly acclaimed in her prior work, and likewise feature in the best parts of The Book of Form & Emptiness. It’s too bad that, in this case, her affecting story is overwhelmed by the novel’s affectedly empty observations about itself.
Jon Fosse
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... translated into simple, stark and often luminous English by Damion Searls in three volumes, the books feel like the culminating project of an already major career. They bring together [Fosse\'s] abiding interests in formal experiment and in the making of art and identity, with his heightened interest in deeply felt religious experience.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)... brainy, brawny ... The plot is shaggier than high-pile carpeting, and features many unsettling sequences ... Telling the story occasions a great deal of polemical wordplay on the part of the narrator about what it means to be a knowing arriviste in the imperial metropole ... Less incisively clever and far more self-righteous are his endless monologues, thought and spoken, about identity, ethics and action ... The protagonist and the characters around him are as willing to theorise themselves as they are to get high or point a gun, and often these three actions happen in concert. The result is a didactic presentation of thugs, addicts and hustlers as salon-grade thinkers and revolutionary polemicists ... Unlike its demanding predecessor — idea-filled and irreducibly searching in its mood and effects — The Committed is a work of assuredly settled and excessively well-demonstrated points. Its rawness and ideated rage make it easy to admire and perfect to study, a bravura impersonation of a major novel.
Gina Apostol
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Revolution According to Raymundo Mata wreaks playful and learned havoc on the life and work of the 19th-century writer José Rizal ... She writes historical fiction like Hilary Mantel on acid. The result is demanding, confusing, exhausting and impressive, and justified, at base, by the origin story of her native archipelagic nation ... The deranged scholarly contours of the novel manifest as a short passage per page from Mata — usually about his reading, his travels and his intrigues, political and romantic — that is otherwise dominated by multiple, rivaling footnotes. The results can be both confidently obscure and also very, very funny ... Apostol’s novel adopts absurd premises that are treated with graven seriousness by wordplay-obsessed narrators who are equal parts unreliable and cerebral ... the book occasionally seems as if it might have been more fun to write than to read. But that’s a minor footnote to this marvelous welter of Filipino storytelling.
Arundhati Roy
MixedThe Globe and Mail (CAN)In Azadi-- a word that connotes freedom in Persian and in several subcontinental languages, and has related, particular resonance in relation to activist politics and social justice movements-- Roy strides, stalks, and marches back and forth across the contemporary Indian scene. She is frequently caustic, hard-minded, and confidently leftist in her observations and critiques of her \'poor-rich country\' ...
Curtis Sittenfeld
MixedFinancial TimesUnless you find yourself to be a juror for the 2020 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, begin reading Rodham at its second section ... The Hillary she first introduces has a wooden interior life, and is as socially awkward as she is steely and serious about serving the common good ... Far more demanding of imagination is Sittenfeld’s later attempt to work out Hillary Rodham’s trajectory after she decides that Clinton’s congenital lack of discipline would cause too much harm, in both personal and political terms ... Rodham is far from an answer to the finest novel about American politics proper, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, if more imaginatively agile as a character study than Primary Colors, Joe Klein’s gossipy fictionalisation of Clinton campaign machinations ... at its strongest, Rodham explores the mysterious territory between the inner and outer lives of a person who has long been a source of fascination, adulation and loathing ... When Sittenfeld details Rodham’s capacity to be so furious-minded and pleasant-spoken, and explores her greater reasons and purposes, we finally meet the Hillary who commands attention.
S. D. Chrostowska
RaveThe Walrus (CAN)The Eyelid imagines a future in which wakefulness is a pharmaceutically powered state imperative to keep people productive and compliant. At odds with this arrangement is an unnamed narrator ... Together, the narrator and the ambassador aid and abet nocturnal imaginations across Paris (now part of the globe-spanning Greater America). These revolutionary acts reveal other lives, stories, and possibilities for people living in a waking nightmare of totalitarian, market-driven, pill-popping, screen-surfing drudgery. S. D. Chrostowska’s dystopian fiction, learned and lithe in its storytelling, holds up a cracked mirror to our time and place, daring us to take an honest look—and dream.
Jorge Comensal, Trans. by Charlotte Whittle
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewAmong other things, The Mutations, a feisty first novel by the Mexican writer Jorge Comensal, is a dark, extended lawyer joke, made at the expense of Ramón Martinez ... Comensal’s brisk, if at times diffusive, storytelling — in a translation by Charlotte Whittle that conveys both his blunt and sharp humor — coheres around the question of how a person (as well as his family members, friends and colleagues) deals with the felt and future consequences of sudden dire news ... [Carmela\'s] is one of the novel’s straggling secondary plotlines, which generally feature characters connected to Ramón through his illness, none of which hold the same charge of high-stakes black humor as his ... The only other character in the novel that Comensal invests with an interior dimension and sense of life and death capable of matching Ramón’s (if not besting it) is Elodia, the family’s pious Roman Catholic maid ... At novel’s end, Comensal turns to a more provocatively ironic situation, when the character most concerned with God’s mercy must decide what kind of mercy she should offer the character who is least interested in it. This makes for a little too neat and obvious a dilemma and resolution, especially when compared with the case Comensal prosecutes elsewhere in The Mutations for the funny, messy unexpectedness of life, death and potty-mouthed pet birds.
Antonia Fraser
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe King and the Catholics isn’t as magisterial as Mary Queen of Scots or as flat-out exciting as Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot. Instead, it’s a convincing and worthy addition to the already impressive Fraser corpus ... Fraser’s presentation of this story is free of both footnote skirmishes and extravagant claims, but she devotes too much attention to the many minor players’ biographical minutiae at the expense of commentary and analysis of the complex, even self-contradictory situations that emerge in the course of her narrative ... There’s readerly consolation, however, in the book’s many small and wonderful discoveries.
Ian MacKenzie
MixedThe Financial TimesThe challenge of a novel like this is to avoid creating a protagonist confined to self-loathing and self-involvement, as can sometimes be the case in Paul Bowles and Graham Greene, while at the same time plotting an engaging story that exposes the stakes and consequences of her implication in the world around her. MacKenzie does especially well in this regard by endowing Emma with a gift for cool and scouring observation. Unfortunately—and this happens more than enough in the novel—Emma offers a little too much grad-student smart analysis of this evocation herself, which saps some of the potency. Equally enervating is her need to ensure we know she reads all the right writers and knows of the relevant high-end literary connections between the Anglosphere and Brazil ... This book, like any other, has a beginning, middle, and end. But unlike most—and this is MacKenzie’s subtly bold gambit — this novel never really offers any crisis or culminating event or revelation or heroic accomplishment set up along that natural narrative line. Instead, Feast Days offers a series of non-climactic episodes and vignettes and flashbacks, all sporting clever and ironic titles, that trace out Emma in her circulations through the crammed-together, antipodal world of the decadent couple day trips, dismal refugee shelters, posh children’s birthday parties and tear-gas-filled street riots ... it leaves you, fittingly, with cool irony.
Jo Nesbø, Trans. by Don Bartlett
MixedThe Financial TimesShakespeare lovers will probably find Nesbo’s book clever and entertaining in its many intensely plotted sequences and in its offerings of high-toned tough guy talk ... Despite many engaging moments, however, the book is too long and loose. Nesbo indulges in momentum-breaking back stories for his characters and devotes too much time and space to their speculations about each other’s motives. He also drags out the story’s denouement, which involves a hostage situation and a large-scale assault on Inverness. 'What happens now?' Macbeth asks, near the end. You don’t need this many pages to find out.
Alan Hollinghurst
MixedThe National Review of BooksFor readers new to his work, its frankness about sex might be unnerving; more formidable still is his decision to create expectations of important, even crowning revelations — about important events and the characters’ involvements in them — without ever entirely fulfilling them ... Thin smiles and ellipses, and later barely but definitely moved Venetian blinds, suggesting someone has just seen something not meant to be seen, suggest a great deal and build expectations of exposure that are answered only partially ... a phrase that suggests Hollinghurst’s commanding position, only strengthened by his latest novel, as a very contemporary English writer deeply formed by the tradition: When asked why, despite his successful career as an artist, Johnny never painted a portrait of his father, he explains, 'We never really knew each other, . . . what with everything.'
Akhil Sharma
RaveThe Financial TimesSharma conjures the seeming marvels of America for the new arrivals – Ajay’s father proudly introduces them to carpeted flooring and hot water on demand while Ajay directly discovers the just-as-remarkable delights of snowfall, 1980s television and lobby doors that open automatically. Meanwhile, true to Indo-American form, Ajay’s parents pressure his bright and assured older brother Birju to study and study and study. He gets into a prestigious high school, only then to suffer the catastrophic swimming pool injury ... The most moving material in this novel concerns Ajay’s reactions to his father’s anger and sadness as it roils alongside his mother’s more placid sadness and endurance. Trying to help and love each of them, and to help and love his brother, and to understand his own part and position in all of it, Ajay turns to reading and writing as his best possible means of doing all of this. Family Life is the hard-earned and impressive result.
Kate Atkinson
RaveThe Financial TimesAtkinson explores almost 100 years in the life of this quiet Englishman and his family and comrades-in-arms via a thoroughly disjointed chronology. She has statements, actions and decisions repeat at intervals, across hundreds of pages. Time passes and events take place in a jumble but eventually disclose the fuller meaning and tragic gravity of matters first understood only dimly or, like Teddy with respect to a mysterious period in his wife Nancy’s life, understood absolutely wrongly … In all of this, Teddy endures a series of revelations and reversals of fortune that find continuity and fine tension through his private vow, before a 1944 bombing run over Nuremberg...With her excellent new book, Atkinson reveals just how admirable such an ordinary man’s life can be, and what heroism lies in living as decently as possible through times that are far from decent.
David Mitchell
RaveThe Financial TimesMitchell unfolds Holly’s larger story from the 1990s to the 2050s through narrators who are each directly linked to her...These intensely told, brightly imagined sequences are riddled with the sudden entry and exit of shadowy characters who are keenly interested in Holly and given to making crazy declarations … Holly and reader alike at last learn more definitively about the theological origins and the time, space and logic-defying nature of the labyrinthine conflict that has surrounded her, claimed her little brother (who is more than just her little brother) and invaded her consciousness and very being for decades … This all must sound ridiculous, exhausting, cheaply exciting and dangerously lowbrow and yes, by every measure it is, save one: David Mitchell has written it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
PanThe Financial TimesLahiri’s people imperfectly answer the duties of family life and the demands of cultural adaptation while struggling with personal longings inevitably at odds with both. To all of this, at her best Lahiri brings a sharp and patient eye. But with her latest, Lahiri’s eye is languorous rather than patient, compulsively pointillist rather than sharp … There could be much to recommend here, but for how neatly and carefully Lahiri confines politics to serve as an inert source of passing spectacle, domestic tragedy and immigrant memory-spinning. The greater problem is Lahiri’s prose. The story seems too often like an extended occasion for the writer’s artful displays (not that they’re always that artful).
Omar El Akkad
PositiveThe Financial TimesNever mind the obvious allure of this bold debut novel’s cracked-mirror patterning on our present moment. With dystopian stories, the frisson of partial recognition can only sustain so much attention; what matters more is the capacity of plot and character to do more than merely fill out a clever premise. Despite some busy and overdone elements — a pseudo-academic framing of the main story and frequent reportorial inclusions of background information — American War commands our attention by focusing it on the trials of one Sara T Chestnut … El Akkad smartly makes it hard, near the novel’s culminating event, to line up political imperatives and personal motives. It is the humane view of this consuming novel that ‘in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.’
Anuk Arudpragasam
PositiveThe GuardianThe novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions about the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others. Arudpragasam uses placid, even poetic prose, with results that range from brilliantly unsettling to questionably indulgent ... [an] often formidable novel.
Nathan Hill
PositiveThe Financial TimesNathan Hill’s grand and sprawling debut immediately brings to mind books by the likes of John Irving, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Donna Tartt ... Hill never really involves the otherworldly figure of the Nix with full-on magic realist conviction. Instead, it is little more than a plot device that affords a bit of Nordic exotica while providing convenient explanations for bad luck, fatalistic worrying and hallucinations ... Hill’s grandiose plays with history and politics and famous people are fine and impressive but also sort of familiar and forgettable. He offers more lasting matter with his late, quiet evocation of an ageing daughter tending to her aged father, with mercy and hard-earned forgiveness.
Adam Haslett
RaveFinancial TimesIt’s in Michael’s storytelling about himself and his family that Haslett has created a distinctive and winning voice and character that transforms what might have otherwise been just-another-accomplished-literary-novel about an American family’s tragicomic goings on into something far more affecting and beguiling...Haslett is at his very best in the sections where he unfolds Michael’s chaotic and exuberant interior life as answers to banal medical form questions. The result is a tour-de-force of manic brilliance, both zealously funny and painfully sad, as when he recounts his life story as anecdotes associated with the various prescription drugs he’s taken over the years (to ever diminishing returns).
Viet Thanh Nguyen
PositiveThe Guardian...this impressive debut contains a Whitman-like multiplicity. The Sympathizer can be read as a spy novel, a war novel, an immigrant novel, a novel of ideas, a political novel, a campus novel, a novel about the movies, and a novel, yes, about other novels. This overreaching mixture leads to occasional missteps that matter little set against the greater result: a bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war and its interwoven private and public legacies. Indeed, this book reads like the absolute opposite of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the clipped, cool fragmentary narrative that has long served as the canonical US literary account of that divisive conflict and its ongoing aftermath.
Boris Fishman
MixedThe Financial TimesAlong the way, there are some funny little moments and a growing sense that Maya and Alex’s ongoing argument about the point of this trip speaks to a crisis in their marriage, which turns out to be more profoundly Maya’s own personal crisis ... Sadly, the beguiling young Max remains little more than a conveniently opaque presence; Fishman could have devoted more attention to exploring an eight-year old’s views of life and family, irrespective of how much or little his particular eccentricities figure. Indeed, when Max finally learns the truth of his origins, his shock and confusion are so heart-rending to read about, for a moment you stop caring about why this kid should never do rodeo.
Sebastian Faulks
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s all so very straightforward and self-explanatory and biscuit bland, you can’t help expecting, especially in light of the novel’s unsettled opening, that this presentation is meant to conceal a mind and a life profoundly fraught by difficult memories, but this is never the case. Rather, Hendricks knows himself far too well and tells us much too much about things that matter far too little, as when he describes beginning his book on the chaotic 20th century: 'I typed the first word. It was It.' Faulks’s novel is accomplished in its historical war sequences, but when it comes to its intellectual demands, this is it.
