RaveIrish TimesA novel of stunning scope and ambition ... Both expansive and intimate ... In less skilled hands, this convergence and symmetry might feel schematic, but Desai’s great gift is texture. Her writing gives even minor characters a sense of history and gravity. Her people never feel invented; they seem observed ... Her prose is luxurious and sensual ... The remarkable and refreshing thing about this novel is how insistently hopeful it remains ... A novel of tremendous scope and emotional richness: absorbing, poignant, frequently funny and, above all, deeply humane.
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Ambitious and engrossing ... The scope is broad but the attention is forensic ... Becky is the novel’s heart, a force for compassion and connection ... Ryan shifts the vast abstractions of history into the intimate, fractured consciousness of its witnesses ... It’s an affair plot, but not at all melodramatic ... Ryan is exquisite at showing how...pasts resurface ... A tightly-wound plot ... A family saga, a ghost story, an affair novel and a social history rolled into one. Above all, it is an investigation into how ordinary lives absorb the shocks of a violent century ... It never slackens: the novel is both ambitious in scope and startlingly nimble.
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Never drifts. Each new memory has a weight; it shifts the balance of the narrative, reconfiguring the relationship between the events that precede it. This isn’t a confession but a reassembly, a story that evolves as the narrator tries to sort through it in her mind.
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Rawle’s narrative is compulsively readable, written with an understated, sharp grace that lets the surreal details shine. From the first page you feel in safe hands, and it’s wonderful to surrender yourself to such a book. ... The book becomes increasingly addictive. The characters are well observed, and the plot moves with balletic precision towards a bleak and gory finale ... Though marketed as a satire, the political edge is the novel’s least persuasive element. Its critiques of consumerism are broad and familiar; in truth, Love Island functions as a far more layered and unsettling commentary on the world we live in, and it’s not as if viewers are unaware of the show’s dystopian undertones ...The novel’s real power lies elsewhere: in its atmosphere, its pacing and the completeness of Rawle’s narrative control. It’s one of the most engrossing and confidently executed novels I’ve read in a long time.
RaveIrish Times (IRE)Excellent ... A powerful exploration of the struggle to separate truth from the stories we want to believe. Dunthorne interrogates not just the omissions and self-deceptions in his great-grandfather’s memoir, but also his own complicated motivations for revisiting his familial past. A triumph of stylish prose, the book tackles dark subject matter with moral precision and a surprisingly keen sense of humour.
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)A slim, crackling novel that compresses an astonishing amount of life into just 190 pages ... Aphoristic, brittle, often dazzling ... The wit is real, but grows wearying. Zink’s characters all speak and think in the same mordant register, which soon begins to feel like ventriloquism. The prose fizzles, but rarely deepens. The emotional pitch remains static, and the narrative draws to an anticlimactic ending: the characters simply drift away, back into their separate lives, largely unchanged ... It captures too well the intoxicated logic of these repeating nights: their momentum, their allure, and their descent into meaninglessness ... At one point, Zink brings her characters to a Burger King, where their enthusiasm wilts under bright lighting. Like most anecdotes of drunken shenanigans, it’s amusing in the moment but ultimately forgettable ... Still, Zink’s writing has an obvious intelligence that makes her flaws appear at least partly intentional. It’s tempting to view the novel as diagnostic. Perhaps she is less interested in telling a story than in mapping a mood, one of stylish drift and emotional inertia. Her characters are fluent in irony and cushioned by privilege. They find themselves spiritually deadened by an excess of false freedoms. If the novel feels empty at the centre, that may be the point. Sister Europe is a portrait of a world where everything is permitted, so nothing matters
Julia Armfield
PositiveIrish Times (IRE)Atmospheric ... What makes Armfield’s apocalypse resonant (and relatable) is its banality. Her novelist’s eye is trained not on the social but on the psychological. The book’s most compelling insights are private ... Even if the considerable risks don’t always pay off, it’s impossible not to admire the ambition and daring of Julia Armfield’s hypnotic and deeply weird book.
