RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)The result is intimate as well as epic, turning her book from a key testimony of a historic tragedy into a work of finely wrought fiction. Even without the protests, I would have happily read it just for the exquisite coming-of-age novel it is ... Wen keeps her canvas impressively small as she conjures up the spectre of authoritarianism overshadowing her world. Like Ferrante, she revels in the grit of her environment ... The final bravura sequence is as gripping as it is devastating.
Joseph O'Neill
RaveThe Times (UK)O’Neill has added a new and moving take on his usual tale of masculine doom, which gives this deceptively light comic novel a subtly profound undertow ... It’s all enjoyable ... By the end, O’Neill has migrated the narrative away from Wolfe’s male funk and into something utterly surprising and female, and it’s great.
Naomi Alderman
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)A fable ... Alderman goes full tilt into globe-trotting Jason Bourne mode here ... Fans of The Power might feel nostalgia for the slick, literary economy of that thoughtful page-turner. Here, the action gets clobbered by the reams of glossy tech and the long, involved clarifications of what’s happening: plots and gadgets having to explain themselves aren’t the catchiest ... Alderman is a fabulous, witty writer on the digital world ... But I found myself yearning for the sharper intellectual acuity and moral gravity of Alderman’s previous work.
C Pam Zhang
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)The world’s first gastronomic apocalyptic thriller ... The novel’s eat-the-rich target feels arguably too obvious at times, particularly when we’re being asked to empathise with a protagonist whose biggest concern, in a world devastated by famine, is that she’s lost the ability to experience pleasure. But as a rhapsody of longing for food the novel is a feast ... As a climate thriller, it may not be in the same league as The Road. But it’s odd and original, and makes a compelling case for finding grains of pleasure in a vanishing world.
Colm Toíbín
RaveThe Times (UK)Sumptous ... This deceptively slim memoir expands out into something far greater than you might expect. In what amounts to not much more than a long magazine article, he creates a sweeping, lyrical portrait of the small-town idiosyncrasies, natural landscapes and family histories in southeast Ireland on which his novels have drawn for three decades ... But fittingly, it’s precisely the details of that provincial world (the setting of so many of his novels) that Toibin conjures up superbly here.
Tess Gunty
RaveThe Times (UK)Seriously impressive ... Thrillingly blends the vivid realism and comic experimentalism so beloved of American fiction. The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable ... Fun and funny ... I found myself cackling and covering the book’s pages with exclamation marks as I read ... The novel leaps with great confidence across a multitude of styles ... There’s so much dazzling stuff here, it can be hard to know where to look. And, in truth, the novel succumbs a little to its byzantine structure and sentimentality. Yet what lingers is something simple: the sparkling interiority of its characters. Gunty didn’t need so many fireworks to make such a stellar arrival as a new writer.
Neal Stephenson
PanThe Sunday Times (UK)Any reader looking for a serious grappling with climate change, or an illuminating fictional version of the wranglings seen at Cop26, will come away empty-handed. Stephenson’s vision of our climate future doesn’t rise above the level of slightly smug, nerdy fun. It’s the kind of novel in which you know someone is clever because they \'earned degrees at Oxford and Yale\', and climate conferences are attended by \'the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor of Londo\' ... There’s also a patience-sapping degree of technical explanation where Stephenson treads a fine line between tech visionary and pub bore ... Much of the time this feels like a climate thriller written for teenagers — except that teenagers would take climate change much more seriously. Stephenson’s reputation as a sci-fi titan is deserved. But better to read Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash.
Joy Williams
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)... kaleidoscopic ... [a] summary almost risks making the novel sound like a coherent eco-thriller—and it’s nothing of the sort. In her outstandingly good stories Williams has always displayed a genius for letting seemingly ordinary beginnings descend into astonishing absurdity. Here, as Khristen treks across the landscape—with fantastic scraps of imagery (\'deserts blackened with solar panels\') bobbing up like flotsam of a vanished world—the novel increasingly collapses into a cacophony of voices ... Haunting depictions of environmental apocalypse have been done with greater drama and realism in other \'cli-fi\' dystopias ... There’s also a preachy, hectoring tone here (Williams’s father was a congregational minister) that can sometimes sap the narrative of its freshness ... Yet this bizarre novel...lingers powerfully in the memory, slipping under one’s skin like a poem. It may be a hard read, but its fragmentary, hallucinatory form captures something essential about a world in disintegration.
Shani Boianjiu
RaveThe Times (UK)From the start, Boianjiu effortlessly builds a sense of surreal contrast between what it’s like to be 19, carefree and full of desire, and what it’s like to be out in the Negev desert, firing automatic weapons and wielding authority over people just months younger than you ... On the surface, her narrators appear to be rendering their lives with an almost diary-like casualness ... Yet because these bizarre, poetic scenarios are so fragmented in nature...they feel, at once, not just like mundane, everyday moments but like distant, flitting memories ... Tedium, mortality and ephemerality are classic features of coming-of-age novels and also of war fiction; here, they are fused fascinatingly together ... With wit and subtlety, Boianjiu has created a refreshingly original kind of Bildungsroman.
