RaveFinancial Times (UK)The perils of isolation and confinement are once again countered by the unexpected grace and tenderness captivity can sometimes bring ... This novel is based on a true story; both women were born in 1791 and Anne Lister kept a 5mn word diary, but you wouldn’t know it. The book wears its painstaking research like the light shifts the schoolgirls sleep in.
Elizabeth Strout
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)There are painful moments...Yet there are also instances of deep, peaceful conviviality ... Strout brilliantly reminds us how long put-away fears and disorders made dreadful reappearances during the lockdown months ... If this novel is less powerful and spectacular than Oh William! and My Name Is Lucy Barton, then the book itself seems aware of its milder tone ... Lucy says a lot of childish things to steady herself. She appeals to an imagined good mother she has invented, who issues soothing banalities. She has a horror of seeming inconsiderate. Yet how could Lucy Barton narrate from the drab depths of lockdown with tremendous precision and flair when she is confused and flailing? It would not have been believable as her voice. Fidelity to the character has a part to play here. While some will claim the book was written too quickly, others will feel this restraint must have required great self-discipline from Lucy’s creator ... Strout gives us an utterly natural conversational tone, the uncovering of stern misgivings in real time, as well as an uncomfortable merging of safety, familiarity and betrayal. The novel also emphasises, as all Strout’s books do, the need for the wrong conversations in life when the right ones are unthinkable. These sorts of emotional prevarications, punctuated by Lucy’s searing courage, give a vivid sense, as you read, of what it means to be alive in such troubling times.
Monica Ali
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)... filled with people who are not just likeable, but loveable. This contract of sympathy, which flows between reader and characters, deepens and enriches the portrait of contemporary London that Ali creates with a confident Dickensian sweep ... teems with domestic epiphanies and brutalities ... wildly entertaining. As you read you’re thoroughly immersed in the intricacies of Ali’s characters ... This is a bold and generous book, with large portions set in a sprawling hospital — the perfect backdrop for asking powerful questions about what constitutes health in life and health in love, now.
Elif Shafak
RaveFinancial Times (UK)\"... a strong and enthralling work; its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world. Its dense mazes of memory make you set aside your own. It blurs the boundaries between history and natural history in profound and original ways ... War and love and violence are daringly mixed in this novel ... Shafak...writes with great control about despair ... The push and pull of teenage emotion is also captured with precision. We see Ada’s thinking mature, experiencing her shifts in perception incrementally. Resisting the urge to simplify or judge is a recurring theme ... a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately.
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Miriam Toews
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)... extraordinarily rich ... Cynical readers might object to a young character being able to articulate her baffled thoughts and feelings with such wisdom and precision. This is an extremely rare little girl who has seen and heard too much too early in life. She is the kind of child who wonders whether their family therapist might be less motivated to absorb extreme anger from her because the family is taking advantage of her \'sliding scale\' of fees. There is nothing she doesn’t comprehend about her grandmother’s complex meds ... But some children just are exceptional. Swiv is conscientious by nature and her standards are sky-high ... No one writes better than Toews about the sharp currents that exist in families where suicide occurs...Yet occasionally I wondered if the balancing of sadness in Fight Night was too risky. I don’t mean too sad (such material does not exist) but it’s possible, by showing so much visceral devastation and framing it with shimmering courage and rip-roaring humour, that the novel risks its moral contract with the reader ... It was as if the world of the book — its forward thrust — suggested that Swiv could manage all this, whereas I worried that she was being destroyed ... Of course, I may have brought too many sandwiches of my own to the picnic. People who are suffering can still have good lives, after a fashion. And you could say that this slight hesitancy about the aftermath of trauma only goes to show how powerful Fight Night is — for this is a novel as compelling and hilarious and indecently sad as life can be.
Maggie Shipstead
RaveFinancial Times (UK)... accomplished and ambitious ... boasts two memorable heroines ... Most novelists have their limits and cut their cloth accordingly. Shipstead is a writer who can vividly summon whatever she chooses, taking the reader deep inside the worlds she creates ... Her writing is confident and knowing; her descriptions of light and air sometimes beautiful ... The novel’s separate strands, in the main, are carefully held.
Claire Messud
RaveThe Financial Times... an uplifting work: complex, precise and bracing ... Two strong-willed, serious-hearted thinkers hover powerfully over this collection. Messud’s pied-noir grandfather — who spent a decade writing a 1,500 page family memoir just for Messud and her sister — and his son, her father, who devoted all his free time to the intricate, private scholarship of philosophy without ever writing on the subject. These twin examples of commitment stand as a beacon of inspiration and also, perhaps, a warning of the dangers of operating so purely and discreetly ... The family section of Messud’s volume is rendered vividly, in sentences beautifully formed and built to last. Some of the scenes she conjures feel unforgettable ... The strength and delicacy of these chapters leave you trusting Messud’s taste and judgment before you sample her criticism, which doesn’t disappoint ... Messud’s rigorous enthusiasm for the writers she admires is infectious.
Catherine Lacey
PositiveThe SpectatorThis is a novel of extremes — to put it mildly — charting Elyria’s slide into a derelict state. It is a witty, knowing and lyrical work that takes as its subject the thoughts and feelings of a woman who has suffered more misery than most humans can take ... This book won’t tickle everyone. Sometimes I felt that Lacey requires her reader to become the less interesting yet devoted best friend/nursemaid/confidante to Elyria and her rather stylishly expressed troubles...But my ungallant feelings soon melted to awe, and compassion for the compelling character that Lacey has created — a woman who is living, as Berryman himself often did, right at the very edge of things. here is much impressive writing here. Lacey excels at describing the way a shaky soul locates strange meanings everywhere ... If Nobody is Ever Missing occasionally grates or seems precious ...it still contains a terrific amount of insight into agony and courage, and suffering with style.
Kate Atkinson
RaveThe Financial TimesBig Sky is a curious mixture: a detective novel about the sorry state of the UK, an exasperated celebration of blended family life and a meditation on loss, adversity, damage and repair ... Atkinson is interesting in this novel on the futility of crime: none of the criminals know where to put their loot, let alone how to garner enjoyment from it ... For this reader (and writer), more interested in texture and character than plot, the mounting tension in the novel is less appealing than the well-made characters and their histories, diversions and asides. Crystal’s stepson, with his love of all things theatrical, has a gallant, wounded nature at odds with his father’s coarse air ... In Big Sky you sometimes get the sort of moments great theatre brings where you aren’t just witnessing skilled acting, you feel something empirically true is taking place before you ... Despite the novel’s melancholy, Atkinson is adept at showing us sharp moments of pleasure ... [Atkinson] is a writer with the world in her hands.
Helen Oyeyemi
PositiveFinancial Times\"... a rich, clever, rueful and sometimes maddening work. Lively and playful, it boasts more tangents and asides than Tristram Shandy ... Gingerbread requires careful reading and re-reading. At times it made this reader feel foolish and stodgy for wanting something as mundane as a foothold ... Oyeyemi’s prose has a generous quality. There is ease and pleasure in her sentences ... Occasionally Oyeyemi’s wild flights of fancy left me stranded on the tarmac, clutching my suitcase, rubbing my poor head. Yet this is a bold book with a great deal of depth and mischief to it that makes you think how astonishing it would be to have our parents sit up with us for a whole night and tell us in fine detail what they have lived.\
Chris Power
MixedThe Financial TimesIt is daring to write a book in which many of the characters take pains to ensure their emotions are hard to read, hiding what they feel from each other, from themselves, from us. Absorbing so much dislocation requires a special sort of focus from the reader that takes time to develop. It isn’t that the stories are especially gloomy, for they have a glassy, modish aspect to them, an aura of cool in all senses of the word, which guards against gloom. It’s more that they can be curiously excluding, aloof almost, holding the reader at arm’s length. I read the collection and then read the stories again in a different order to try to get inside them more, and as I did they grew in strength and atmosphere ... It’s the things at the very edge of the stories, barely touched on, that seem to hold the most emotional weight here ... These are strange stories, forbidding and unnerving, which need to be read carefully with an ear trained to what isn’t being said, what isn’t being heard.
Bill Cunningham
PositiveThe Financial TimesCunningham’s memoir depicts a life that is fulsome and mirthful but also oddly austere. Sometimes there was no money, his diet reduced to three spoonfuls of Ovaltine, his shoes patched with scraps of cardboard. His hat-making seems more like an addiction than a career. For Cunningham, however, beauty was worth every sacrifice. Reading this memoir, it is necessary to forget for a moment that no woman wants to be valued primarily for how she looks. That is quite a lot for a book to ask. Yet as a record of a life fuelled by flair and dedication, a highly original vocation which pitches the author somewhere between Cecil Beaton, Anna Pavlova and a Benedictine monk, Fashion Climbing: A New York Life is a joy to read.
Matthew Weiner
PositiveThe Financial TimesHeather, the Totality is a short and brutal novel, with a noirish central nervous system that is tense and fraught … Each paragraph of this novel is framed for emphasis and drama by quite a bit of white space. Almost everything we learn, we are told and not shown. The result is a fable-like text so primed for disaster that I found myself thinking of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, about the Titanic. Yet despite its unvaried tone of impending catastrophe, this debut novel still surprises … There are moments of sharp insight in this short book — unexpected, tender things said with little or no emphasis, chiefly about motherhood and the echoes of disillusion and neglect passing through the generations — that linger long and hard.
