PositiveVultureGains momentum as it goes on, flowering finally into something sadly beautiful — a meditation on growing old, the mutability of relationships, and the fragility of social progress, framed by the world-on-fire mood of the present. Like old age itself, it just takes a while to get there ... It’s when Dave comes to sexual consciousness that Hollinghurst really starts cooking ... The weaknesses of the first half of Our Evenings underscore Hollinghurst’s great strength: He is deeply, brilliantly a writer of adult relationships ... Like life, the book has an effect of accumulation, scattered scenes building toward something with real emotional weight.
Carmen Maria Machado
RaveBookPage... stunning ... To call it a memoir is to give short shrift to the exquisite strangeness and formal innovation that Machado achieves ... a clever device, but it’s also a propulsive one, and occasionally leavening ... If this all sounds very metatextual, know that Machado has pulled off an amazing feat: a book that comments on its own existence and the silences it endeavors to fill; a work deeply informed by a sense of identity and community; and page after page of flawless, flaying, addictive prose. In the Dream House is astonishingly good.
Edward St. Aubyn
PositiveThe Chicago TribuneLost for Words, a series of madcap set pieces, concerns a major British literary award, the Elysian, whose zone of eligibility is ‘confined to the Imperial ash heap of the Commonwealth,’ as one character puts it. Any likeness to the Man Booker Prize is in no way coincidental … For all his savage wit, St. Aubyn also wants to explore the redemptive qualities of whatever lies beyond it — and beyond social status, beyond wordplay, beyond awards … This book is like the first glass of water you drink on a hungover morning: light fare but, given what's come before it, entirely refreshing.
David Mitchell
PanThe Chicago TribuneThe overall goal here seems to be a favorite Mitchell theme — the eternal interconnectedness of people — but it comes at the expense of poor Holly, who is young at the story's outset and old at its end. She is the book's heart. But after the first chapter, we don't hear about her inner life again until a truly irrelevant postscript … A New York Times profile recently suggested we think of Mitchell's body of work as a ‘macronovel,’ with parts that have yet to reveal themselves — and so maybe the information overload of this book will illuminate some later work. Taken as a single volume, though, it registers simply as overload.
