MixedThe Times (UK)Boyhood Island is a classic coming-of-age story — a Norwegian Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — albeit of a particularly unformed and sprawling kind, set on the island of Tromoya in southern Norway in the 1970s and 1980s ... It is a novel about worlds opening — books, music, girls, pornography — and about realising that you are a misfit ... Knausgaard has taken the decision to exile his grown-up voice from the story, which is a great mistake. After some interesting early observations on memory, the narrative concerns itself entirely with the accumulation of mundane detail, taken to avant-garde lengths ... Only towards the end does the crucial Knausgaard voice re-emerge: rueful, mock-heroic, a hero out of Dostoevsky or Knut Hamsun, condemned to a footling modern life.
Dave Eggers
PositiveThe Guardian\"... a sober, sincere, old-school novel with big social themes ... The saving grace is that Eggers\' subject is so timely and important, and the way he dramatises it so apt and amusing ... Though Eggers deserves credit for presenting a nuanced and sympathetic view of the kingdom, the novel\'s Saudi Arabians are not always successful ... More generally, the weightlessness and emptiness, though deliberate, sometimes threaten to engulf the novel – especially since Eggers is temperamentally anything but a minimalist ... Nevertheless, this is a clever, likeable and very entertaining novel. A Hologram for the King treads lightly and elegantly, considering its weighty subject matter: globalisation and its discontents, the downsizing and outsourcing of the American dream, real people lost in an increasingly virtual world.
John Lanchester
MixedThe Times (UK)\"Lanchester deploys a brisk, minimal version of the conventions for establishing dystopian worlds ... If it doesn’t quite form a satisfactory whole, maybe it’s because the characters and the prose are numb and functional, which is in keeping with their world, but rather prevents the story coming to life. The novel becomes an adventure that is too grown-up to give the reader conventional narrative thrills, but not quite original enough to offer something more nourishing: at its weakest, it is like reading a disappointingly flat version of the trashy Kevin Costner film Waterworld. Even so, Lanchester’s fictional world is intelligently conceived and dourly impressive ... The Wall certainly sticks in the mind: it is a resonant addition, from out of left field, to the growing body of Brexit literature.\
Joe Dunthorne
RaveThe London Review of BooksThe Adulterants is a very funny comedy of arrested development ... It’s rare today to see a really talented writer go all-out for comedy, but Dunthorne makes it look like the obvious choice ... And where so many modern British novels with modern British settings founder in their attempt to wring compelling dramas out of trivial, uneventful lives, Dunthorne seems on very solid ground. What other form except broad comedy could you use to depict these pampered kidults, with their carpenters’ shirts, their fancy smartphones and their pointless jobs? ... brief and accessible, but very carefully crafted ... Readers who are allergic to irony and archness may not be impressed—the book is so arch that you could drive a horse and carriage through it—but it provides a steady flow of good gags and is, in its way, satisfyingly resonant too ... By the end, the novel has proposed an original conception of innocence; sympathy and contempt, warmth and acidity, irony and sincerity are mixed up together in surprising but satisfying proportions.
Margaret Atwood
MixedThe GuardianI thoroughly enjoyed MaddAddam and the other two books...But they do present an eccentric spectacle – of a fierce, learned intelligence, throwing out references to Robinson Crusoe, Blake and especially Milton, while writing what is essentially an epic B-movie … The best literary SF, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Atwood's own patriarchal dystopia The Handmaid's Tale, manages to solve these problems. But this time round, I fear, Atwood has preserved the disadvantages, while failing to capitalise on some of the genre's advantages: namely, its ingenuity, and its fast-moving plots. What saves the trilogy is its complexity, its tough-minded satire, and its strangeness. MaddAddam is a wild ride.
J. K. Rowling
MixedThe GuardianThere are some superficial excitements here, in that the younger characters get up to things that Harry probably never dreamed of: taking drugs, swearing, self-harming, having grimy casual sex, singing along to Rihanna ...The Casual Vacancy is a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel. Set in the 'pretty little town of Pagford', it is a study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot ...has all the satisfactions and frustrations of this kind of novel. It immerses the reader in a richly peopled, densely imagined world ... On the other hand, the novel is very much the prisoner of its conventions ... The plot is often predictable; it requires a large helping of artificial contrivance; and it lurches into melodrama in the final act ... The Casual Vacancy is no masterpiece, but it's not bad at all: intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny.
