MixedThe Evening Standard (UK)Never does a Nicholls will-they-won’t-they romp go unrequitedly into that good night. The author...has a rarefied talent for teasing fondness from sore spots most would rather forget, finding the bruises a reader has tended and gently prodding them ... Charlie Lewis is a reluctant, curiously bland narrator, all the more frustrating given that we are stuck, in the first person, inside his head throughout ... We all have our thoughts of self-ennui, but being saddled with some else’s starts to drag. Are we to fill Charlie’s blanks? He certainly feels like an empty vessel, a faded Go Between left in the sun too long ... The sweltering inertia is relieved by brushfires of Nicholls’ crackling dialogue, sweeping up the readers and bearing them aloft on an updraft ... There is sweet sorrow in this deadbeat suburb ... But the plot lumbers — the furthest reaches of the map never feel explored ... Nostalgia is a place we shouldn’t linger in, Nicholls seems to say, and yet we tarry in still pools of it. The mundane doesn’t quite transmute. You wonder — was there much to tell?
