About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Julia Armfield
Mixed The Times (UK) I love Armfield’s writing, but not so much apocalypse fiction, which is an unfair bias to bring to this review. I find hopelessness a turn-off ... Even if the generalised sadness of this novel doesn’t come close to the incisive political smarts of some of her other stuff...and even if the horror movie-style ending doesn’t quite land, I still enjoyed it. Armfield writes so gracefully
Paula Byrne
Rave The Times (UK) Fat and absorbing ... From deep research Byrne adds plenty of detail (perhaps she might have pared it back a little — it’s over 500 pages) and colour from his endless romantic entanglements.
Cal Newport
Mixed The Times (UK) While not mind-blowingly original, these are sensible, thoughtful suggestions with demonstrative benefits ... But there is a big problem with Newport’s solutions: they presuppose a level of autonomy over the working day that few office workers possess ... I would like to see Newport attack the office problem on this kind of bigger scale — and not via the illusion of personal autonomy.
Lauren Oyler
Positive The Times (UK) \"An essay is the opposite of a tweet: it allows for complication, doubt, space to breathe. And in this collection, Oyler, one of nature’s contrarians, does the opposite of what most people do online: she cartwheels gracefully through a series of reverse virtue signals (vice flashes?). She’s suspicious of popular opinion, Ted talks, vulnerability and rising above. She likes snobs, Henry James and talking about people behind their back. Brilliant ... I loved her essay \'The Power of Vulnerability,\' a blast against the corporate world’s love affair with everyone showing their soft sides, and the ending of her essay on expat life in Berlin, a beautifully clarifying account of nostalgia and the tug of new places ... The style is a little chewy. Oyler likes digression, anecdote, playfulness and puns, all of which are fun but they come at the expense of pithiness, something I enjoy in an essayist. I want to be able to lift a punchy little quote to save in my Notes app. Still this is a seriously thought-provoking book, one that contends with what the internet is doing to us. I too love gossip because it confirms \'the existence of other people really living.\' No Judgement made me want to live a little more.\
Sloane Crosley
Rave The Times (UK) Crosley is thoughtful about things most people don’t want to think about ... Even bereaved, Crosley is funny, just about more inappropriate things than usual (not a criticism) ... It is a short book that could have been shorter — I’m not sure we need the detailed literary scandal, or the bit about the pandemic — but that’s not really important. It’s honest and hedgehog-fierce with love.
Rebecca K Reilly
Positive The Times (UK) For a debutante, Reilly’s voice is delightfully confident ... The chapters are buoyed along by their breakneck internal monologues and deadpan dialogue ... It’s clear from the start that Reilly is a very funny writer, but I wish she would relax a bit. Eventually, the relentless quips wielded by literally everyone become exhausting.
Elaine Feeney
Mixed The Times (UK) Perfectly fine ... Why doesn’t Feeney’s second novel...quite take off? Perhaps it’s because the characters all feel reliant on broad single personality traits ... The subplots and side characters are left underdeveloped ... Readers in search of something warm but a bit literary might like it a lot. It’s just that its odd inclusion on the Booker list (I reckon the judges wanted to throw something cuddly in with all the heavy stuff) came at the expense of a lot of better books.
Hilary Mantel
Mixed The Times (UK) There are essays on politics, America, cricket and Biggles, a superb one on procrastination and several I could have coped without ... There is so much more I want to know. If her fascination with anorexia, which she wrote about again and again, crept up from her own experience, her body forever her battleground. About her husband, gentle geologist Gerald, whom she met at 16 and married at 20, divorced at 28 and remarried at 30. Their story is a novel in itself. Mantel was obsessed by ghosts — inevitably, she has become one. How do we summon her back? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? A really good biography. I wonder who will write it.
Naoise Dolan
Mixed The Times (UK) Dolan is clever, effortlessly so, and her observations about people usually add something to the typical clichés ... But I’m not sure Dolan makes us care enough about these fridge-cold people to warrant such granular breakdowns of their deficiencies ... The weird thing is that in theory it sounds like the perfect novel ... When I sat down to write the review, I could remember oddly little ... There are lots of clever-sounding quips that don’t mean very much when you break them down.
Lauren Groff
Positive The Times (UK) Peril...is no guarantee of tension. The daily business of staying alive...is oddly mundane ... Groff shows an impressive commitment to realism. You sense the reassuring weight of research behind her descriptions of cold, still-alive oysters sliding down the throat and the sound that ice-buckled trees make as they shiver and explode. This might easily have resulted in a seriously boring book but it doesn’t. Groff is too nimble for that. With calm and surgical prose she glides towards the horror that lurks on the far side of desperation ... I like Groff because she doesn’t care about being cool. Her writing has a timeless quality.
Clare Carlisle
Positive The Times (UK) Scholarly and thoughtful.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Rave The Times (UK) \"...before the politics, she nets you with chemistry. Katharina and Hans narrate their own seduction, their voices sliding past each other in Erpenbeck’s exquisite ink ... Theirs is the kind of passion that bursts open like a soft fruit dropped onto a hard floor, but Erpenbeck makes you believe in it, for they are not just arduous but hesitant and shy ... Erpenbeck is not the first writer to use a romantic relationship to explore a wider political landscape, a trick that can sometimes feel a bit flat. This person is like that place — sure, and what? But Erpenbeck is better: she tells this love story not just to describe the course of history, but to try to understand it ... Under the weight of the GDR’s collapse, the romance creaks a little. Perhaps that’s why Kairos is almost entirely humorless (that you will love it nonetheless is testament to just how good the rest of it is)...Perhaps this is a fault of Michael Hofmann’s otherwise lovely translation, or perhaps (sorry to stereotype) it’s just very German, or perhaps it’s because romance is inherently self-important (it happens to everyone, but it feels like it only happens to you). So what? Not everything is funny. But people tend to find a joke anyway, especially when things fail, and I wish Erpenbeck had shown us that. Instead, in this elegant novel, there are only tears.\
Joanna Biggs
Mixed The Times (UK) Full of strange and arresting images from the lives of talented oddballs ... Assembling vignettes of extremely famous writers...is easy, but tying them together is harder. The subtitle, Nine Women Writers Begin Again, suggests a thesis that never quite emulsifies ... Biggs could have chosen a different genre or written this one better.
R. F. Kuang
Pan The Times (UK) A crime caper that’s also a wicked little satire of publishing, racial politics and icky internet culture ... In telling the story from Junie’s magnificently self-justifying point of view, Kuang tosses around slightly tired arguments about authenticity and fiction ... Based on a smart and fun idea, but lacks structure and a bit of heart ... Junie spends a lot of time telling us how important writing is to her, but in language so clichéd, sentimental...and mercenary that it’s impossible to believe ... Kuang’s own writing is perfectly serviceable but it never leaps upwards into fresh, cool air with the force of originality, brutality or just plain old beauty.
Sophie Ward
Positive The Times (UK) The Schoolhouse is a legit crime thriller: stylish, pacey and genuinely frightening ... Ward manages her thickly plotted story well, alternating Carter’s no-nonsense narration with extracts from 11-year-old Isobel’s diary from 1975. Police reports and newspaper clippings are sandwiched into the prose, primed for snarfing by readers hungry for clues ... Ward is fond of short, staccato sentences... and mini mid-chapter cliff-hangers. There’s even something close to a jump-scare, which is not a device I would have thought could translate from screen to page ... There are moments where Ward’s style clashes with the requirements of the genre; she likes to introduce characters subtly, sparingly, which means the cast of police officers are difficult to differentiate. Her tendency to withhold on backstories left me longing for more on Carter’s personal life and mysterious childhood. Yet perhaps my taste has been spoilt by a diet of crime stories propped up by tired tropes about detectives’ romantic woes.
Marion Turner
Mixed The Times (UK) Turner exhaustively, painstakingly and sometimes clunkily (there’s a few \'hilariously\'s that aren’t all that hilarious) catalogues all these afterlives. To literary nerds and students with Chaucer essays to write it’s useful, but for everyone else (and this is a book intended for the lay reader) it’s of limited interest ... Somewhat ironically then, for a book inspired by a “timeless” character, the most interesting chapters are those in which Turner considers Alison in the context of her own time ... The Wife of Bath is a small literary miracle: an oddity and a trailblazer whose mischievous energy this erudite but ponderous book doesn’t quite manage to emulate.
Laurent Mauvignier, trans. by Daniel Levin Becker
Positive The Times (UK) It would be useless to pretend that The Birthday Party feels anything like your standard airport thriller. It is, as I mentioned, set almost entirely across a single day; what I omitted was that it’s 500 pages long. That’s about 20 pages per hour. The sentences are long, very long sometimes, light on punctuation and circle round their subjects in snaking coils ... Does kind of work as a thriller. The slow-motion sentences become piled up with suspense like snow-laden branches. You have to wait and wait and wait for the violence that is so clearly just a few hours — or a few hundred pages — from erupting ... This is classy writing and worth, I think, braving the 500 pages. It could be worse, after all — it could be 800.
Meg Howrey
Positive The Times (UK) Lush and enjoyable ... Feels like a commercial success in waiting ... Glossy, fast-paced ... Howrey is a stylish writer, sometimes funny...and sometimes touching. On dance, particularly, she writes with such precision ... But Howrey also has quite a few annoying habits. The tedious continuous present tense...the long, descriptive sections recapping family history, the pretentious artsy jokes about Rodin and Stravinsky and carefully signposted Shakespeare quotes ... The whole novel has a feeling of soap opera, with its emotionally fraught tone and somewhat predictable twist ... But there’s an intent to all the melodrama.
Joanna Quinn
Rave The Times (UK) ... a lush, roving William Boyd-style novel. Slightly alarmingly, it is the the Dorset writer Joanna Quinn’s debut (although she has been working on it for nearly a decade, apparently) — how on earth is she this good? You know what? Who cares. Just dive in and slurp it up ... full of brilliant set pieces — an endless summer afternoon when forbidden lovers find themselves finally alone on a beach; the sudden suspicion of the Nazi official when the weary spy blunders — that pop and crackle with tension ... Quinn handles her sprawling cast with ease and compassion. No one is irredeemable or unexplainable ... Quinn is particularly good on the stupidities of aristocracy ... It’s beautifully written too ... Quinn has fun mucking around with the boring old novel format. She smushes letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings and an exhibition catalogue into the prose (a very Boydian trick), but always for a reason ... Occasionally I got fed up with the whole 20th-century tragedy through the eyes of an aristocratic family formula: it’s overdone and it makes people who live in big houses and do nothing look glamorous and interesting. It’s a bit hard to get past the fact that the three heroes of this story are called Cristabel, Florence and Digby, however much you love them. But Quinn is no fusty, Debrett’s-thumbing apologist, and cleverly she threads the hope of the destruction of the old class system into the tragedy of war. Something rotted away can be repurposed anew, like the whale on a Dorset beach that gives the novel its name. It’s that simple. It’s that clever.
Louise Perry
Mixed The Times (UK) ... crisply readable ... [Perry\'s] solution is a diet of security measures so extreme it would make a Puritan pour her a drink. She wants women like me to only get drunk or high in private with other women, boycott dating apps and withhold sex for the first few months of a relationship ... This is impractical and ignores the huge chunk of rapes that are domestic ... The most powerful and persuasive part of Perry’s argument is about the cast-iron link between violent sexual behaviour and the gigantic internet porn industry.
Sloane Crosley
Positive The Times (UK) If you’re madly in love, stay away from Cult Classic. By the last page, you may not be. It’s an anti-rom-com, by which I mean a rom-com in cynic’s clothing ... It’s a neat – and delightfully feasible – framing device for a novel, one that reminds you that the bestselling New York essayist Sloane Crosley is a caustic skewerer of internet millennial life on a par with Patricia Lockwood. It enables her to pose a bunch of big old questions about love and companionship in a way that feels twisted and fresh ... Crosley is dry and very funny ... If ultimately Cult Classic has more of a concept than a plot, it hardly matters since it’s a truly fun way to pass the time. Yes, it’s just a romance, but deciding who to recruit for your own personal cult, otherwise known as monogamy? Seems like a pretty big deal to me.