About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Richard Powers
Rave The Guardian (UK) A transcendentalist deep dive of a novel ... What a lush, opaque world Powers conjures for us here ... Works best as a fabulous exploration ... Rambling, rapturous.
Andrew O'Hagan
Rave The Guardian (UK) It’s an addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider’s grasp on the nuances of high culture. But this bustling, boisterous burlesque has the sour undertow of despair ... This is rollicking fiction lifted from on-the-ground fact, the novel rekitted as a journalistic first draft of history ... O’Hagan falters slightly when he’s running alongside London’s youth, with their fist bumps and shout-outs and full-on happening parties. Elsewhere, his prose is nimble, lively and sure-footed.
Phillip B. Williams
Mixed The Guardian (UK) A bold, ambitious, often beguiling piece of work – an epic folk tale of Black American emancipation. But the tale’s prolonged scenic ramble demands stamina and resolve ... This is a book to get lost in – sometimes pleasurably, sometimes not. The tale takes its time and the detours are engrossing, exploring the consequences and complexities of a life of freedom. Williams writes in a rich, unhurried roll, while his prose is so flamboyant that it’s tempting to ignore its occasional woolly imprecisions.
Francis Spufford
Rave The Guardian (UK) \"Cahokia Jazz nods to the hard-boiled prose of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It rattles through the urban jungle in the manner of a fast-paced dimestore thriller ... An overtly political writer might at this stage be laying the ground for a different breed of drama – a revisionist revengers’ tale, perhaps, in which an alliance of Native Americans and former slaves wrest control from their historic white oppressors. Spufford’s approach is more playful than prescriptive, more akin to that of an expert model engineer. He builds a world and paints the scenery, provides a physical map and useful background information, to the point where the act of creation becomes a story in itself. Cahokia, unavoidably, is a hotbed of racial and cultural tensions. But it primarily serves as an ornate film-noir playground; one that stirs memories of the alternative Alaska that formed the centrepiece of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ... But the book’s route, although jolting, is rich with incident, texture and colour. Think of the genre plot as a tour bus; a handy mode of transportation. Spufford rides it through Cahokia and lovingly points out all the sights.\
Tan Twan Eng
Positive The Guardian (UK) A book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy ... If Tan’s antiquated constructions call attention to themselves, I think that’s partly the point. Everyone in this drama is wearing an ill-fitting mask. Sooner or later they are liable to unhook and slip loose.
Tom Hanks
Pan The Guardian (UK) It would be nice at this point to confirm Hanks’s book as a satire. That way we could applaud the means by which it deftly – even affectionately – pricks the pompous self-regard of Hollywood’s inner circle, complete with a star who unwinds by taking her Cirrus jet for a spin and a gonzo method actor who insists on sleeping in a tent. We might then go on to laugh at the idiotic footnotes that provide a needless justification for the use of slang and blithely mis-explain Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. Alarmingly, though, this tale is deadly serious. Johnson is great and Knightshade is amazing and therefore everything about them is a source of endless fascination. The production, says Hanks, runs for 53 days. Somehow his book makes it feel even longer ... A bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction, a bungled behind-the-scenes tour that can’t see the wood for the trees. It’s crying out for an editor. The plot is borderline incontinent ... aking a movie is tough; writing a novel is hard, too. So accentuate the positives, draw a line and move on. On a pure sentence level Hanks’s book is at times pretty good. Overall I confess it was very much not for me.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Mixed The Guardian (UK) \"Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive, almost too much to process ... it’s a nightmarish burlesque about industrialized racism. The sheer weight of this supporting evidence—happily accommodated by the book’s maximalist style—frequently spins us off course. Alternating chapters roam far and wide, keeping tabs on a supporting cast of TV executives, \'abolitionist\' protesters and a sceptical armchair critic who is slowly sucked in and converted. These cutaways give Chain-Gang All-Stars the bracing panoramic sweep of an old-school social novel in the vein of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, but the technique needs finessing. As it is, Adjei-Brenyah combines the winning confidence of a young artist who is unafraid to tackle an enormous canvas with the nervousness of a debutant who worries about leaving his reader with the same group of people for more than a few pages at a time. His plot is constantly interrupting itself to move us along and show us something new.\
Salman Rushdie
Rave The Guardian (UK) Every futuristic science fiction tale is unavoidably concerned with the here and now. The same surely goes for historical fiction. In the course of Victory City, Rushdie sporadically frames his invented past as a window on the present ... If this sounds fatalistic, the tone is anything but. On the page, Rushdie’s fairytale of futility feels positively jaunty, very nearly a romp, and it covers the ground at a brisk, steady clip.
Quentin Tarantino
Positive The Observer (UK) ... rollicking, ramshackle ... Tarantino likes looking under the bonnet and pulling at the fabric, showing how a film was put together and explaining how it could have gone other ways. Or rather, he does until he doesn’t: until his focus shifts and his attention pivots and he promptly starts chasing a fresh train of thought. His book embodies its sliding-doors concept, almost to a fault ... Some film-makers prefer to conceal their influences...Tarantino, endearingly, wears his on the outside, like a one-man Pompidou Centre with all the piping exposed. True to form, Cinema Speculation conducts a personal joyride through his film education, veering from the recognised heavyweights of 1970s Hollywood to a menagerie of scrappy unsung outsiders ... As a critic, it transpires, Tarantino writes exactly as he speaks, in a torrent of information and opinions; fuelled by breathless enthusiasm and unexplained grudges, rhetorical questions and full-throttle digressions ... I’m tempted to file Cinema Speculation as a paraphrased remake itself – an extended extrapolation of its author’s film-making day job. As with his pictures, it’s garrulous, indulgent and in desperate need of an edit. But it’s also bracing and heartfelt, positively ringing with life. Tarantino is happiest going deep on the pictures; he largely leaves himself unexamined. Nonetheless, this whiplashing tour sheds light on his apprenticeship, revealing the rackety upbringing of the boy who would one day be king. Like Proust with his madeleine, he remembers being dragged by his mum and her dates to see blaxploitation pictures at the Tower theatre in Compton, California. Tarantino recalls the wonder, the danger, the sense of tasting forbidden fruit. It’s an experience, he says, he’s been trying to replicate ever since. He’s come close with his films. He comes close, too, with this book.
Cormac McCarthy
Rave The Guardian (UK) Extraordinary ... The Passenger is like a submerged ship itself; a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller. McCarthy’s generational saga covers everything from the atomic bomb to the Kennedy assassination to the principles of quantum mechanics. It’s by turns muscular and maudlin, immersive and indulgent. Every novel, said Iris Murdoch, is the wreck of a perfect idea. This one is enormous ... This is a book without guardrails, an invitation to get lost. We’re constantly bumping into dark objects and wondering what they mean ... On a prose level, McCarthy – now 89 – continues to fire on all cylinders. His writing is potent, intoxicating, offsetting luxuriant dialogue with spare, vivid descriptions ... What a glorious sunset song of a novel this is. It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic.
A. M. Homes
Mixed The Guardian (UK) A jittery tale of crisis and opportunity ... Homes’s tone is similarly discombobulated, veering between barbed satire and nuanced domestic drama like a train clattering over the points as it homes in on DC ... Homes whisks through the intrigue with a cool eye and a keen ear, animating Hitchens’s clandestine meetings with whip-smart, affectless dialogue ... Homes’s rueful prehistory of the Maga movement ultimately risks feeling like a book caught between two eras: a state-of-the-nation novel from the recent past.
Sadie Jones
Rave The Guardian (UK) Jones’s sixth novel is a fabulous thing: vivid and funny, sometimes heart-rendingly sad. Like Frith, it positions itself as a retreat from the big bad modern world, a deliberate step-change after 2019’s moneyed state-of-Europe bestseller The Snakes. But again, like the farm, the setup is misleading. Jones’s fictional landscape is jam-packed, abundant, and her smallholding as thick with intrigue as the Borgias’ court ... Surfing a wave of children’s chatter, the book traces the commune’s history and gently exposes its faultlines ... Jones does a fine job of painting this dysfunctional utopia, held together with chicken wire and petty cash. But her novel works best as a kind of conjoined coming-of-age tale, flicking between Amy and Lan’s narration as they march from early childhood towards puberty ... The prose skips freely between the past and present tense. Amy and Lan’s voices are interchangeable, overlapping, like a vibrant Venn diagram, because they mostly see the world in the same way. But the book’s imperfections are all of a piece. I don’t think I’ve read another recent novel that better captures the pure sugar-rush of childhood; the sense of a life so exhilarating and ecstatic that it is almost too much to bear. There are cakes and champagne and that wheelie bin full of rats. Inevitably, too, there’ll be a flood of tears before bedtime.
Jonathan Franzen
Rave The Guardian (UK) ... splendid ... in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning than like the latest yield of a familiar crop, or a newly discovered branch of a big midwestern family ... Franzen lays on a lavish spread of self-doubt and dysfunction, simmering tensions, heaped indignity, the sort of fraught festive gathering everyone can relate to. Rolling into New Prospect is a lot like coming home ... Franzen is brilliant at framing the lies people tell, the stories they spin, elegantly lancing his characters’ self-justifying accounts with evidence to the contrary ... It’s a skill that proves equally effective when played for laughs or horror ... Franzen tends to be bracketed alongside the likes of John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, the other big lions of American letters. If anything, though, he reminds me more of Anne Tyler. He has the same fascination with the domestic arena (the great drama of small lives), the same keen ear for dialogue and a similar understanding that comedy and tragedy can be natural bedfellows. True to form, Crossroads wins us over with its array of social pratfalls and a cast of warm, well-drawn characters. It is expansive and funny; a pure pleasure to read. But all the while it is nudging the Hildebrandts closer to the brink ... Franzen has laid the ground beautifully, and his first act is intoxicating – a luxuriant domestic drama that opens out into politics, running against the grain of the counterculture with its focus on the friction between conservatism and radicalism, Christianity and social activism ... All the same, there is a restless energy here that bodes well for the future. Whipped by the times, Franzen’s 20th-century seekers are flailing and giddy and yet somehow still standing. They are groping for a fresh direction, a new way of being, an ideal to live up to.
Jonathan Franzen
Rave Publishers Weekly \"...a sweeping and masterly examination of the shifting culture of early 1970s America ... Throughout, Franzen exhibits his remarkable ability to build suspense through fraught interpersonal dynamics. It’s irresistible.\
Stephen King
Rave The Observer (UK) ... meaty, satisfying slab of high-concept pulp fiction ... an atmosphere of creeping dread and a keen awareness of the cogs and wheels of bureaucratic evil ... The success of The Institute is in the way it repurposes this familiar material to spotlight a 21st-century US in crisis; corrupted and compromised and mired in debt. The Institute sits alone in the woods. But it’s symptomatic of a wider malaise.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
Mixed The Guardian \"The view changes so often it’s hard not to feel turned around. Sometimes, reassuringly, Killing Commendatore runs across ground the author has mapped out before ... As ever, Murakami is brilliant at folding the humdrum alongside the supernatural; finding the magic that’s nested in life’s quotidian details. Yet on this occasion he allows his disparate elements to spin out too widely, to the point where they begin to appear only tenuously connected ... Killing Commendatore, [Murakami\'s] 14th novel, feels almost like a debut ... [Murakami\'s] pace remains easy and unhurried. His prose is warm, conversational and studded with quiet profundities. He’s eminently good company; that most precious of qualities that we look for in an author. We trust him to get us entertainingly lost, just as we trust that he’ll eventually get us home.\
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Positive The Guardian \"...the book’s waters run wide but not necessarily deep. Room to Dream provides contours and edges, brief splashes of insight and teasing tugs on the line. But the man at the centre remains a beautiful mystery ... Room to Dream, then, is at its most illuminating when it focuses on the nuts and bolts of the director’s work; charting his ascent from a gawky art student to \'a brand and an adjective\' ... Lynch emerges from these pages as principled, flighty and resolutely incurious about his own inner workings. He’s constantly chasing the next big idea or the next regenerative love affair, reluctant to pause and unpick his decisions, at least for public consumption, away from the meditation mat. The world is a mystery and his films live in darkness. He’s prepared to tell us how they happened but he’s not about to tell us why.\
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Positive The Guardian \"...the book’s waters run wide but not necessarily deep. Room to Dream provides contours and edges, brief splashes of insight and teasing tugs on the line. But the man at the centre remains a beautiful mystery ... Room to Dream, then, is at its most illuminating when it focuses on the nuts and bolts of the director’s work; charting his ascent from a gawky art student to \'a brand and an adjective\' ... Lynch emerges from these pages as principled, flighty and resolutely incurious about his own inner workings. He’s constantly chasing the next big idea or the next regenerative love affair, reluctant to pause and unpick his decisions, at least for public consumption, away from the meditation mat. The world is a mystery and his films live in darkness. He’s prepared to tell us how they happened but he’s not about to tell us why.\
Sergio De La Pava
Positive The Guardian Boldly billing itself as \'a protest,\' the book takes hold of American football and duly hot-wires it to the national grid, so that the sparks jump across a matrix that extends from stadium sport to the prison system to a shadowy criminal cartel known as the Absence. Reading it is a little like being accosted by a brilliant conspiracy theorist on the night bus home: assuming we go with the flow and ward off the occasional moments of outright exasperation, we may just come away converted ... Lost Empress gives us the author as ringmaster and his characters as show ponies. No doubt a more exacting editor would have tidied the novel’s rougher edges. They might have fleshed out its inhabitants and closed off various avenues of inquiry, thereby ensuring a more coherent end product. But in so doing they would have risked breaking its spirit, short-circuiting the book’s crazed interconnectivity. Far better, on balance, to leave the thing as it is: a teeming microcosm of the American Dream and its relationship to a network of oppressive social systems. Lost Empress is zealous and unruly, jolting and uproarious; it’s all over the map. But what it lacks in rigor it more than makes up for in life.
Stephen King & Owen King
Positive The Guardian ...a bulging, colourful epic; a super-sized happy meal, liberally salted with supporting characters and garnished with splashes of arterial ketchup ... In framing small-town America as the microcosm of a single-sex planet, Sleeping Beauties could be the Y-chromosome sibling to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, in which three explorers gatecrash a feminist utopia. But devotees of King Sr will find more familiar echoes here, too ... Sleeping Beauties is at its most satisfying during its breakneck opening half, as the crisis takes hold, before the allegorical baggage piles up. One of King Sr’s great strengths as a writer is his mastery of the milieu of small-town USA, his uncanny ability to ventriloquise its inhabitants and keep his myriad pieces in play. His tale only falters when it doubles down on its premise, belatedly introducing a parallel Dooling, a shadow world for the sleeping women that is 'so much better than the old man-driven one' – although even here it manages to redeem itself. The denouement is ambiguous, elegantly open-ended. Assuming the two tribes can be reconciled, one is left with the sense that they are destined to remain at a distance ... perhaps it’s no accident that this epic feels so vital and fresh. Sleeping Beauties comes fuelled by a youthful vigour that King Sr hasn’t shown us in years.
Jonathan Dee
Positive The Guardian At times Dee’s tale hops around with too much abandon, channel-surfing across the heads of its ensemble cast ... the ground appears to have been laid for an acid political satire, a tale that charts the creeping progress of fascism up Main Street USA. Except that the author appears to delight in confounding expectations, even at the risk of doubling back on himself ... Dee likes dramas that change direction. He paints his moral universe in shades of grey. And here he appears to have outdone himself, rustling up a portrait of a New England town in a state of flux that seeks to make a bonus out of its lack of resolution. The Locals is first intriguing, then exasperating, and finally rather admirable in its open-ended narrative. Audaciously, this sends the reader in pursuit of a shadowy quarry, pointing us towards the dark heart of fictional Howland, Massachusetts. Then it removes all the signposts, repositions the cameras and leaves us to find our own way back out.