RaveFinancial Times (UK)Questions of knowing and refusing to know, seeing but not believing, scratch at us in Chidgey’s pages. Perhaps never more effectively — or entertainingly — than in The Axeman’s Carnival ... It’s hard to convey just how delightful and compelling all this is.
Olga Ravn, trans. by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Ravn’s self-reflexive game grows muddled ... Sometimes the voice is impersonal ... We may even salute this variant experiment in form. But this novel is laborious: less Olga Ravn’s work than our own.
Kate Atkinson
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Nellie is cunning, inscrutable, greedy and almost as slippery as Atkinson, who knows we shouldn’t like this fleshy matriarch, but makes it impossible for us not to ... a riot of inconclusion, rife with red herrings and double-crossings, characters scrambling the maze of plot lines with self-questioning at every unlikely turn ... As the riotous story concludes, the relief we feel when a lost girl arrives safely home is sincere but fleeting. We don’t mind when one character ends up in tragedy and another stuck in stasis, or even what happens to the Amethyst: these are components in a story, and fiction is a game. What stays with us is a glimpse of a newspaper delivery boy on the first page. He is not mentioned again until the very end, when he is killed during the invasion of Sicily in 1943. We are told his name is Norman, and his last words are \'Good show\'.
Rachel Yoder
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The hybrid existence at the heart of Nightbitch is gloriously resolved, and whether the mother ever really had six nipples and a tail remains essentially unimportant. Yodel is endlessly playful, never strident and has no combative axe to grind. Her writing is elegant, fast-moving and funny in its mission to show how horribly tedious childcare can be. After all, few grown women actually enjoy playing with trains. Meanwhile, the pressure to be seen to be content can lead to rage, and there is no shame in howling when overwhelmed, with labour, or with love.
Jenny Offill
PositiveThe Times Literary SupplementLike Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation...Weather takes the form of short paragraphs, each beautifully shaped and self-contained, but the mood in these pages is more relaxed than in the previous book, despite the oppressive zeitgeist that overshadows them ... The story unfolds in the present tense, conversational, engaging ... Courageous, quirky and charming, Offill’s Lizzie is a woman you want to spend time with.
Jeanette Winterson
PositiveThe TelegraphWe are shown \'how it is when the mind works with its own brokenness\', and come to respect Winterson’s psychological courage and her rage to love, despite the \'savage lunatic\' she discovers inside herself ... The prose spills with questions, reflection and information. Winterson is full of books, and wants us to know those she most esteems. She quotes poetry, novels, plays and hymns. She gives idiosyncratic snatches of social and political history. She talks of Freud, Jung, God and fairy tales. We learn that dog biscuits taste like the real thing if you dip them in sugar, and that it’s possible to mend a clutch cable with two bolts and a can of Tizer.
Adam Foulds
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Dream Sequence notices everything ... Description is intimate and visceral, scratching at the glossy surface of the lives of the characters and underpinning the \'vacuum\' they move through, together but apart ... This is a novel of screens, of echoes and constant counterpoint, driven by changes in light as much as its reflective plot where matters of \'acting\' are paramount ... [a] shimmering novel.
