PositiveThe Irish Times (UK)This brilliant \'biography\' of modern Greece will easily surpass others in the field by Richard Clogg, Thomas Gallant and Stathis Kalyvas. Probably only Kostas Kostis’ very recent History’s Spoiled Children can compare. And why? Because, apart from his extraordinary erudition and scholarship, Beaton writes with measured compassion and a refreshingly straightforward style ... He is particularly sensitive to the ambivalence of Greek people and their politicians to the east-west tug-of-love in which Greece has been caught up since its inception. Is it western? Is it eastern? For Beaton, it is unquestionably both ... The weakest section deals with recent events, since so much of what he can say must of necessity be speculative and provisional. Nevertheless, he is utterly realistic when he says the crisis has obliged Greeks \'to take stock, to look again at their history, at the values they grew up with, at their own sense of who they are and where they belong in the world\' ... I would have preferred more discursive citations; many are to Greek-language sources which haven’t been translated. The lack of a full bibliography suggests, misleadingly, that there is nothing more to be said ... Beaton could have given us more on the continuing presence in Greek culture of Turkish elements such as cuisine and rebetika music, and his very brief references to film-makers ignores the seminal work of Theo Angelopoulos ... magisterial and user-friendly.
Nicole Flattery
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)This book is not boring, not unimaginative, not without a dry humour or a sense of irony. It also does have an authorial voice—but Nicole Flattery’s narrative voice is monotonous, with almost no variation in tone, no cadences, no impetus. It is persistent without being insistent. It does not shock, nor engage the reader with its rhetoric. It will not raise readers above their own level of experience or excitement. The stories are heartfelt and poignant, but the heart needs a bypass and the poignancy needs a shot in the arm. The second serious issue is the lack of originality. This is not a new voice in Irish fiction but a familiar echo of world literature ... Whether or not Flattery has read Kafka, Maupassant, Ivan Klima, Jiri Grusa or Cocteau, the echoes amount to imitations which are, dare I say it, the highest form of flattery. It would be fine if these echoes were transcended, but they stick out like unpaid rental agreements ... The monotony is one of unhappiness, insecurity and mistrust, hardly ever leavened by intimations of joy or beauty. Flattery seems to enjoy her misery, but cannot make a virtue of it ... The intention seems not to describe emotions or to offer any unique insight so much as to impress with cleverness. There is no end to it ... There are sections of great power — emotional, ethical, aesthetic — but they do not add up to stories because there is no connecting Flattery. They are just word-bites, like bits of a bad-weather forecast strung together and adding up to a storm warning that is never fulfilled ... This is clever writing, but no more than that. Great writing provokes a great emotional response. I felt that I had been impressed by Flattery’s use of words, but never that I was in the presence of a pen with style.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
MixedThe Irish TimesThis is a sad book. [Mackintosh-Smith] writes with passion in the midst of bombs and violent protest. Yet at the heart of his book is the paradox that the essence of the Arab existence is discontinuity and confusion, rather than unity and cohesion ... The author abandons any claim to balance when he declares \'the Israelis have graduated from throwing bombs to the more civilized method of dropping them\' ... The author is long on quotations from Arabic sources but short on their wider context ... These oversights suggest that the author’s agenda has been so narrowly focussed on elucidating the essential nature of Arab identity through the ages that it has preferred not to take a wider perspective on the controversial and multicultural hinterland of his subject. Moreover, the endnotes are so impenetrable as to disaffect the enquiring reader.
Alma Katsu
RavePublishers WeeklyKatsu injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party ... The members of the party come to suspect that shape-changers are responsible for the carnage, and they encounter increasing challenges to their survival. Fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills.\
