PositiveThe Herald (UK)Mozley, who is now based in Edinburgh, offers a vision of the district that is full of competing interests, sex, violence and encroaching gentrification ... What follows is a gallimaufry of a novel. In short, here comes everybody ... \'Sprawling\' describes the cast and plot, but not the writing, it should be noted. Mozley’s prose is precise, controlled, unshowy, deceptively readable. She tells the story through dialogue and short, sharp sentences ... She’s great at detail. And there are moments when she can change the mood from one sentence to the next, the way life can change in an instant and forever ... Perhaps, you could argue that some of the characters are stock types. Maybe too, you could argue that the book’s climax is too much of a deus ex machina (for all the prior notice that is elegantly given) ... Reading that feels like a promise of a life now lost but maybe one day soon, vaccines permitting, regained.
Seth
RaveScotland Herald...years and years of effort have now been gathered together into one chunky, beautifully designed volume weighing in at the best part of 500 pages ... it’s a typically Sethian universe that’s conjured up in these pages: a world of big cars, old buildings, salesmen doing cold calls, Bakelite phones and a sense of quiet desperation ... This is a story that plays with nostalgia – the way things once looked and felt – but also investigates the very idea of it ... You may find that authorial voice too insistent; it’s a book of monologues for the most part after all. But that’s a reflection of the strength of Seth’s imagining. This is his world we have entered. Leave your own at home. And in the end, once you have slowed down to the book’s pace, what is thrilling is the silence, the space, the moments of peace. We can’t live there. That’s the shame of it, for Seth as much as anyone, I imagine. But we can linger.
