RaveFinancial Times (UK)\"As so often with Harris, the joy is in the history as much as the story. There are two conspiracies in this book but...it is only when you reach the end that you realise that the author’s narrative skills have tricked you into focusing on the sideshow ... more drama than thriller. For all its pace—you will zip through it in no time—the rewards are in the meta-story. But Harris’s deceptively effortless prose means you barely notice. The effect is one of total immersion: you can feel the cold, taste the bacon sandwiches and imagine the trolleys squeaking across the floor.
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Ian McEwan
PanThe Financial TimesBy the end of this short, occasionally elegant and no doubt cathartic fictional essay, McEwan has inadvertently given readers a fresh insight into the arrogance and contempt that liberal society feels towards those who have dared to defy it by voting for Brexit. For all the flourishes one would expect from a novelist of McEwan’s brilliance, this falls way short of his usual standard. There is little of the acuity and human insight of say, Saturday, his last heavily political novel, or even of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England. Instead, the work reads like a piece written in a blind fury ... No doubt there will be homes in the leafy suburbs of deepest Remainia where this work will be read with delight and celebrated for its humour and genius. For me, at least, it simply symbolised the self-righteous inability to understand the half of the country that does not have the innate good sense to agree with McEwan ... The descriptions of physical transformation are unsurprisingly excellent though [McEwan] is not the first author to riff on Kafka’s classic. But as soon as he returns to the pure politics, the intelligence gives way to unfiltered and uninquisitive rage. What a shame. A cold-headed, forensic McEwan on Brexit would have been worth reading.
