About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Vigdis Hjorth, trans. by Charlotte Barslund
Rave Financial Times (UK) Another crisp, cogent translation by Charlotte Barslund ... The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates
Jo Hamya
Rave Times Literary Supplement (UK) Hamya’s prose is crisp and fluid ... The author’s main target here is the gaping chasm between the generations and the ways in which living in the internet age is accelerating those age-old differences.
Andrew O'Hagan
Positive iNews (UK) The scale of the narrative means that several characters read like caricatures ... But this is a book that will get people reading.
Fiona Williams
Mixed iNews (UK) [Williams] uses first-person narration for everyone except Richard, whose story is told in the third person. This amplifies the sense of discord between him and Tess, which works well as a narrative device but makes it harder to connect with Richard ... Williams’s writing is richly atmospheric ... But she forgets you can have too much of a good thing, overdoing the figurative language.
Francis Spufford
Rave The Telegraph (UK) \"Spufford’s counterfactual narrative is an ingenious backdrop to his first foray into crime noir. He’s entirely convincing about the possibility that Cahokia survived into the 1920s, influenced not by Aztecs but by the Jesuit fathers, who fled north after the fall of Tenochtitlan ... What most gripped me, though, was not the resolution of the murder case, entertaining though that was, but the evolution of jazz-loving, piano-playing Detective Barrow – \'a bum who can’t seem to get it together to decide if he’s a cop or a pianist\' – who spends almost as much time figuring out who he is, as he does who killed Frederick Hopper. There is a particularly neat segue back to human sacrifice. It’s a delight of a novel – one that will send those who know Spufford for his fiction scampering to his non-fiction backlist.\
Teju Cole
Rave iNews (UK) An undercurrent of violence swirls throughout the book, which shakes up the form of the novel itself by eschewing anything as conventional as plot for eight fragments, presented as chapters. Cole plays with form ... The effect is dizzying and illuminating and seems, in retrospect, such an obvious way of bringing a city to life that it’s surprising the technique isn’t used more often ... A brilliant book.
C Pam Zhang
Rave iNews (UK) Zhang’s imagination is as rich as the dishes her narrator prepares. This is a zippy, fresh take on dystopian fiction that Zhang clearly had fun writing. That much is clear from the acknowledgements: a love letter to gastronomy ... As much a parable as a novel about the murky morals of the 0.1 per cent club. Required reading for them and a tasty treat for everyone else.
Charlotte Mendelson
Rave The Times (UK) Mendelson is a master at family drama and plots don’t get much more dramatic than this ... There is a lot going on; almost, at times, too much ... She writes from multiple perspectives, switching viewpoints more and more frequently as the weekend reaches its fiery climax until she is skipping between consciousnesses in a single paragraph. The effect is exhilarating.
Andrew Miller
Rave The Spectator (UK) Painful yet beautiful ... Miller is a wonderful storyteller, as comfortable writing about the Napoleonic wars as the Troubles. Other authors love him, and he deserves more readers. In this novel, Stephen’s reckoning may be extreme but his message is universal.
Kate Atkinson
Mixed iNews (UK) In one succinct chapter, Atkinson launches her genre-straddling blockbuster, which combines the colour of a historical drama with the pace of a thriller and the detail of a police procedural. In short, it is crying out to be the next big Sunday night series ... Yet, as readable and masterful as it indubitably is, Shrines of Gaiety left me slightly cold. It can’t have been the characters, who are all solidly drawn, from flighty wannabe novelist Ramsey, one of Nellie’s sons, to fickle Freda, who quickly becomes one of Frobisher’s missing girls. Nor can it have been the story, which is compelling as the body count mounts and backstories emerge ... No, what grated was the plot. Everything felt too convenient, from Gwendolen’s chance meeting with Nellie’s other son, precisely when in need of being rescued, to the ease with which she endears herself to Old Ma Coker by being – where else? – in the right place at the right time. I kept guessing what was about to happen, which meant there weren’t enough thrills for this to work as a thriller ... Not that this will stop the book’s sure-to-be-soaraway success. Atkinson, who was 43 when she published her first novel, has done enough to delight most of her existing aficionados – and even I will look forward to the inevitable TV adaptation.
Anthony Marra
Rave The Spectator (UK) A sweeping book ... Marra is a deft and convincing writer with a sharp turn of phrase and a dark sense of humour that ignites every page ... Marra’s biting commentary elevates it to more than a beach read. Those who already know the Californian-dwelling Marra from his first two books...will relish his return, which took him seven years to research and write and which will win him committed new fans and, if there is any literary justice, prizes.
Sandra Newman
Mixed iNews (UK) Everything is firmly in the vein of matriarchal fantasy novels...but Newman tries to step up a gear by tackling other issues such as race, trans rights, sexuality, politics and even God’s existence ... Grappling with these subjects feels like the right move but the treatment can be blunt. They call for serious unpicking yet have the air of an afterthought ... Yet any quibbles should not distract from what is a propulsive read, provided you don’t overthink a plot that is overreliant on backstory. What is worth thinking about, however, is the type of society we all want to be living in, and that alone makes The Men worthy of your reading pile.
Leila Mottley
Positive iNews (UK) With so much at stake, you might have thought Mottley would be content to unpick the repercussions, but she has plenty more to throw at this short novel. So much, in fact, that she risks turning what is a compelling read into a succession of scantily painted characters, including a drug-dealing brother, a Black Panther father, a rich, rapper uncle and a mother who has committed the most heinous crime of all, though it is mentioned almost only in passing ... Mottley is a master at describing scenes but spends less time on people. Oakland appears as another character ... The climax, when it comes, is subtle rather than explosive, but moved me to tears. Mottley has said she wrote the first draft in a couple of months, an impressive feat which helps to explain the book’s rhythmical flow. She has ducked out of college, which she started early, to write. The pressure is on what comes next. Now that Mottley has found her own voice, America – and readers in the UK – will be watching.
Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein
Rave iNews (UK) Expect, then, Ferrante fans to fall upon In the Margins – a slim essay collection on the pleasures of reading and writing – as much for any clues about its author as revelations about her childhood bibliography ... Some may be disappointed, however, because although Ferrante is generous when it comes to explaining the triggers for some of her best work, she is miserly about personal details. The collection nonetheless provides a window into Ferrante’s mind ... All four essays in In the Margins...started life as lectures ... This gives them a slightly stilted tone, which can feel at odds with a writer renowned for her agile prose ... In particular, she worries she is at a disadvantage because of her gender. This leads to what, for me, is the joy of this collection: a call for more women to follow in her literary footsteps ... And if giving little away about herself is helpful, so much the better.
Emily St. John Mandel
Positive The Times (UK) Mandel fans will relish the reappearance of characters from previous novels, including Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel: she likes to get value from her creations. But Sea of Tranquility stands on its own, either as an entertaining introduction to sci-fi for those normally averse to the genre or as an original way to reminisce about living through our own pandemic.
Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Rave iNews (UK) ... haunting ... The prose is crisp and poetic; the translation, by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, a sharp mirroring of the French text ... deserves to stand alone.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Spectator (UK) What Strout is doing, in her customary crisp prose, is getting the reader — addressed throughout as ‘you’ — to reassess every single relationship they’ve ever had: with their partner, their parents, their children and themselves, while they can still do something about it ... Reading Strout feels like it might get you closer to knowing at least some of those things; or failing that, remind you that not knowing can also be OK. ‘We are all mysteries, is what I mean,’ concludes Lucy, as she battles to fathom William. ‘This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.’
Joy Williams
Rave The Times (UK) The message may be bleak but the tone is anything but: Williams is a bitingly funny writer ... If the narrative is fractured, well, so is our world. And that is Williams’s point, one she amplifies with frequent references to physical harrows—spiky tools that break up the earth — which are painted everywhere in her broken land ... a book that is as baffling and frustrating as it is brilliant and, ultimately, inspiring. Anyone new to her work has a treat in store, provided they can get hold of her backlist.
Keith Ridgway
Rave The Spectator (UK) \" ...a sultry, steamy shock of a novel ... a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths ... Ridgway is a master at manipulating emotions. One minute he’ll have you smiling in wry recognition at the absurdity of London life, the next wincing at how the cops treat a kid in Peckham who’s smashed his kneecap after crashing a stolen moped...Like everyone in A Shock, that kid would also have a story to tell if only someone would listen. It will help if Ridgway keeps writing them.\
Chris Power
Rave iNews (UK) ... thrilling ... Power writes like the short-story specialist he is ... No detail is superfluous, no incident incidental. This makes reading his elegant plot even more of an adventure, each clue an invitation to second-guess the narrative ... Power is also playing with what his book is about: is it a thriller about a ghostwriter who fears for his life, or something deeper about the nature of stories and who owns them? Either way, it is a vodka shot of a read: down in one and savour the afterburn.
Adrienne Raphel
Positive The Guardian (UK) ...I read Thinking Inside the Box and realised the richness of the American relationship to crosswords. Adrienne Raphel, an aficionado, mixes history with reportage from the crossword frontlines ... Her writing is packed with the sort of beautifully observed details you’d expect from a New Yorker contributor.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Don Bartlett
Rave The Independent (UK) His endeavour, not to mention fluid narrative, which skips around in time and place, both externally and internally, invites obligatory comparisons with Proust, who Knausgaard has, of course, read. The result is a remarkable insight into the mind of a man in the grip of a mid-life crisis as he battles with the big questions posed by parenthood and the unwelcome realisation that there is no second chance ... The many passages on parenting have a raw honesty. His description of his wife giving birth is exemplary ... The other topic he tackles head on is depression, his wife\'s depression. It\'s uncomfortable, if instructive, stuff ... Surprisingly for one so self-obsessed, his achievement is that his struggle ultimately becomes that of his readers.