RaveToronto Star (CAN)Mesmerizing ... The Fortune Men, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, manages an intimate presentation of Mattan’s experience by way of a present-tense, close third-person narration. Mohamed provides her reader with a nuanced, closely observed psychological portrait of a man who was guilty of many things, but not the crime for which he was sentenced to die ... Mohamed insists on his full humanity while also making clear the extent to which he was scapegoated by a racist and uncaring judicial system. Mohamed’s approach in this regard is canny ... In what is arguably the only misstep Mohamed makes, the sections involving Diana disappear in the second half of the book; there is a sense that this aspect of the story is not so much concluded as forgotten or abandoned ... Mohamed illustrates the doomed man’s faith in the British judicial system until well after it is merited: even close to the end, he believes his innocence will save him from the hangman’s noose. His naiveté is the central damning indictment of this searing, affecting and distressingly relevant novel.
Kevin Barry
PositiveThe Toronto Star (CAN)Few imaginative writers signal their process or intent as blatantly as Kevin Barry in his third collection of short fiction ... Barry’s writing has never tended toward the rococo: the influence of his iconic literary forebear, James Joyce, is felt more often than not in the inclusion of low jokes and gleeful vulgarities. By contrast, Barry’s prose tends more toward the Protestant parsimony of Samuel Beckett, with a strong strain of Flann O’Brien’s insouciant wordplay thrown in for good measure ... all attest to an author made positively giddy by the potential of language embedded in the specificity of a particular, locatable place ... Only the Cormac McCarthy-inflected Ox Mountain Death Song and the closer, Rothke in the Bughouse, feel somewhat out of place in this new collection.
