RaveNew York Times Book ReviewNo one else writes \'thrillers\' as languid as Lawrence Osborne’s. His novels tend to be leisurely, slow-burn mysteries that could be mistaken for impeccably observed travel memoirs ... The tale begins to move more quickly ... Human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages ... Osborne skillfully — and with exquisite prose — probes the nexus of community and character, and how where we are shapes who we are.
David Ignatius
RaveThe Washington PostThat’s the thing about an Ignatius novel: It’s not merely its ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness. Ignatius brings his immense skills as a journalist to his fiction, researching the idea and enriching his plot with both the latest spycraft and the arcane workings of, very often, the CIA ... Ignatius’s unsettling novel reminds us that we have created a world where facts have \'alternatives\' and the \'news\' on social networks can’t be trusted. It’s a page-turner, but it’s also a chilling story of the way the Internet has been weaponized.
Josh Malerman
PositiveThe Washington Post\"A novel whose premise is also claustrophobic and unsettling, but more ambitious than that of Bird Box ... The fact that the children are referred to by letters, instead of names, makes it difficult to differentiate all of them ... rich with dread and builds to a dramatic climax ... Malerman reminds us the real horror is not the blood that will splatter the towers. It is not the loss of innocence precisely, but something subtler and more poignant — the malevolence that could see yearning and love as something negative in the first place ... The children are not in cages in Malerman’s eerie new book. But they are lab rats.\
George Pelecanos
RaveThe Washington PostAmong Pelecanos’s gifts as a storyteller is that he understands the appeal of moral ambiguity and authentically flawed characters. That skill is on full display here. So is his sense of humor ... In many ways, The Man Who Came Uptown is a book about books ... So while much of this story is classic crime noir...I found myself also reading the book for the Proustian madeleines that Pelecanos serves us.
David Wroblewski
MixedThe Boston GlobeThe plot moves ahead in the manner one familiar with Hamlet might expect, especially if Shakespeare had had access to old cars, baseball on the radio, and dog breeding. Wroblewski is a terrific writer and has an unerring ear for dialogue — both spoken and signed — and his scenes involving Edgar and his dogs are both authentic and moving … A little bonding goes a long way, however, and there is a lot of bonding in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. There are scenes once Edgar has fled into the woods with his dogs that last an eternity. There are his encounters with a ghost (not his father's) that slow the novel for no apparent reason. And there are those lengthy transcripts from old letters about dog breeding that seem to belong in a science fiction novel.
Paul Harding
PositiveThe Boston GlobeThe novel is less about the details of one man's life than about the labyrinthine journey all of our lives will take at the end. There are certainly the precisely rendered specifics of George's boyhood, as well as lengthy sections about his father, Howard, a tinker who sold odds and ends to rural New Englanders from his horse-drawn wagon. Harding's interest, however, is in the universalities: nature and time and the murky character of memory. He is focused on the formative moments when the clay is still damp, not those long periods when we are already hardened statues … The small, important recollections, however, are rendered with an exactitude that is poetic.
Eleanor Catton
RaveThe Washington Post...astoundingly complicated and almost defies explanation … The 12 parts of the novel...wane like the moon: Each part is roughly half the length of the section that preceded it. Part 1 is 358 pages long. Part 12? Two … Throughout the novel, Catton shifts perspective among the dozen luminaries — as well as her other characters. She has created an erudite, omniscient 19th-century sort of narrator … Everyone in The Luminaries is hoping to get rich quick, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world where almost no one can be trusted and almost no one is telling the truth. At least not the whole truth. But the key to following the story is to try to follow the money. The result is a finely wrought fun house of a novel. Enjoy the ride.
Eowyn Ivey
PositiveThe Washington PostPerhaps because of my preference for heartbreak and dread in fiction (a personality disorder, I admit), on occasion I wished that Sophie and Allen weren’t so relentlessly good. The colonel is, mostly, patient, forward-thinking and resourceful. Sophie is a plucky feminist with a sense of humor. I craved a little of the tension that marked the behavior of that couple coping with the loss of a baby in Ivey’s first novel. The new book could also be shorter; I know from experience how often I have fallen in love with my research and bogged down a narrative. Nevertheless, To the Bright Edge of the World is a moving, surprising story.
