MixedFinancial Times (UK)Haddon captures the resilience of maternal love ... Haddon has a dark, visceral, imagination ... The collection — which has moments of brilliance but is suffocated by its many allusions — speaks to literature’s participation in, or ingestion by, a larger vogue for karaoke culture ... Whether the source material is being used as a crutch or an exercise in brand recognition, it feels cynical as well as cyclical, while pre-used hooks all too often have blunt barbs. Also, on a fundamental level, a fiction writer persistently following another author’s lead — even to interesting ends — isn’t really doing their job. A plasterer isn’t an architect. Haddon, one of Britain’s most inventive storytellers, would be wise to return to his own blueprints.
Anne Michaels
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Her alchemical abilities are undimmed. It is really a novel-in-stories, delivering a series of pivotal junctures in the lives of a string of characters — some obviously linked, others more tenuously. Spanning the 20th century and reaching into the near future, this series of decisive moments presents love, both romantic and familial, as a temporary balm to inevitable loss ... The elliptical delivery makes it difficult to gain purchase on the book’s overall structure ... Yet these flaws do not undermine the power of the family story at the book’s heart. There is a truth to the humanity she depicts, and the idea that in the harshest moments just the simple presence of another person can provide relief. That is the touching embrace of the title.
Jonathan Miles
RaveFinancial Times (UK)Entertaining ... Miles writes in a rattling from-the-hip fashion, which only adds to the book’s party atmosphere. A cycle of revelry and hangover persists ... The French Riviera emerges from this well-researched, enthusiastically shaped book as a constant temptation.
Graeme MacRae Burnet
RaveFinancial Times (UK)[A] barnstorming psychodrama, which successfully fuses mystery, comedy and a meditation on the nebulous nature of identity ... Burne...likes to play with the framework of a novel. Here, he uses a see-saw structure, switching between passages of his own biography of the fictional \'enfant terrible of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement\' and six notebooks written by the nameless receptionist. What begins as a detective story morphs into a trippy examination of the perils and pleasures of taking on a persona ... The musty north London milieu, with its chintzy tea rooms, cold park benches and sticky pubs, is brilliantly evoked ... Consistently inventive, caustically funny and surprisingly moving, this is one of the finest novels of the year.
Celeste Ng
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)The novel feels algorithmically set to appeal to a paradox particularly prevalent among Millennials and Generation Z: a fixation on the individual experience equalled by an appetite for tribal inclusion. And the dystopian narrative is the perfect vehicle for that contradiction, combining as it often does the struggle of the underdog with a search for kinsfolk ... Ng has crafted a neatly structured story — split into three parts, giving the viewpoints of Bird and his mother, followed by the consequences of their reunion — and conjured up a feasible vision of a near-future America. The novel, however, is let down by a syrupy treatment of romantic and parental relationships. The mother-son equation is touching but hyperbolic, and Bird and Sadie too often sound and think like adults, their reasoning frequently structured like an identity politics seminar ... More impressive is Ng’s treatment of the gradual disintegration of objective lawmaking, the incremental rise of racism and the tendency for people to turn the other way in the face of injustice ... Perhaps the cleverest touch, however, is Ng’s depiction of librarians as honourable knights and libraries as silos of dissent (the American library service is presently combating a sharp rise in book bans). Ultimately, Ng’s skill at plotting cuts through the occasional slip into schmaltz to produce an engaging cautionary tale. No doubt it will be on a streaming service sometime soon.
T C Boyle
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)Boyle’s thorny humour — pitch black and sarcastic — lightens the worst of circumstance and neutralises the posturing of his self-important characters. And, thankfully, he delivers a few happy endings ... His stories are frequently narrated by educated professionals bamboozled by a sudden turn of events. But they don’t always differentiate themselves ... Minor characters however are conjured up clearly ... While these speculative stories are amusing, they are not as sharp as the present-day parables about the effects of global warming and identity politics. When his writing is at its most incisive, as it is in many of these stories, few authors can match Boyle’s ability to nail humanity’s talent for scuppering itself.
Werner Herzog, trans. by Michael Hofmann
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)... intriguing but flawed ... The island’s mass of flora is invoked to oppressive effect. Density and humidity are captured with sharp brevity ... Herzog’s talent, on the page as on the screen, is in recognising the everyday in extreme situations, how the extraordinary becomes ordinary ... Yet this view of Onoda as a castaway is problematic. In reality, following Japan’s surrender, he went from being a soldier to a terrorist. Philippine forces were killed and local farms plundered during his campaign. Herzog chooses to avoid this issue in favour of mythologising. He also fails to differentiate between his protagonist’s sense of duty and what could be considered a form of mania ... A larger problem is that the novel, like its protagonist, is stuck in the jungle. To engage with the enormity of Onoda’s experience, the reader needs to understand the character of the young man who went into the undergrowth — his childhood hopes and family life — and his emotions during the years following his return to civilisation in 1974. Before his death in 2014, aged 91, Onoda married, farmed cattle and opened a youth camp. Sadly, Herzog spends little time on these essential bookends. As a result, deliberately perhaps, Onoda remains an enigma.
Hernan Diaz
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)(UK)... sharp and affecting ... Such persuasive — almost hypnotic — storytelling provides the thrust of Trust, in which Diaz illustrates how a fine provenance can engender an absurd belief in a tall tale ... This quartet of narratives works like a combination lock: by revisiting events we recognise pressures imposed and felt and truth click into place. We also see how capital can \'bend and align reality\' ... Part of the pleasure in reading Trust is in trying to work out where Andrew’s arrogance ends and his ghostwriter’s flair begins ... captures the swagger of the robber barons and the early days of late capitalism, as the seductive allure of playing the stocks shows its teeth. What might seem a less dramatic milieu than the wagon trains and gun-toting prospectors of his debut in fact delivers an oppressively baroque atmosphere of intrigue and moral funk ... The tone switches easily between the comic and the tragic ... it is in his ugly-beautiful portrait of great wealth that Diaz shows his brilliance ... In this literary Rubik’s Cube, Diaz provides a viable, and hugely entertaining, argument that once a pen is put to paper an element of veracity is always lost.
Sandro Veronesi, Tr. Elena Pala
RaveFinancial Times (UK)What might have been a folly is a towering achievement ... In a bravado exercise in chronological orientation, which demands readers’ close attention, short chapters flit back and forth, from the 1970s to the near future, stopping off at key points in Marco’s life ... Veronesi is as sharp as a glass of grappa on the Italian obsession with appearance ... Veronesi chronicles Marco’s journey from childhood to parenthood and beyond with a light comic touch, a playfulness that focuses on his protagonist’s love of the quiet life ... It’s a testament to Veronesi’s competence that he can bring fun to such brooding themes. Not since William Boyd’s Any Human Heart has a novel captured the feast and famine nature of a single life with such invention and tenderness. Veronesi explores, with great humour, how the passage of time both expands and expunges the impact of events. And, he suggests, after the pounding of years it is only an individual’s character that determines whether or not the edifice will hold.
Claire Keegan
RaveFinancial Times (UK)Poignant ... Keegan has a keen ear for dialect without letting it overwhelm conversations ... Keegan has condensed a colossal piece of humanist fiction into a tiny volume. Hugely affecting, the story of Bill Furlong will remain with readers long after they close the book: he represents everyone whose kindness outlasts their presence.
Nickolas Butler
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)... an effective blend of rural fable and snow-lashed Rocky Mountain noir ... the suspense — every nail-gun and rickety pick-up truck seems imbued with danger — is balanced by the fraternal intimacy shared by the three workmen ... The novel takes a nuanced approach to male friendship. While Butler captures the jab-and-dig banter among the paint pots and timber, there are also subtle kindnesses and considerations. And tar-black humour punctures the tension ... Butler has produced both a finely tuned literary thriller and a portrait of small-town life as a Petri dish of hope and hubris.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
PositiveFinancial TimesFor Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, two Pulitzer Prize-winning American arts journalists, Bacon has been a decade-long obsession. And with Francis Bacon: Revelations, an 800-page tome, they are clearly aiming for the definitive biography. Bacon, however, proves an elusive prey ... The biographers don’t entirely unpick the psychology of a man who could go to a champagne reception while his dead lover sat slumped on a lavatory. But, although generous to their subject, Stevens and Swan have succeeded in creating an incomparable resource for art historians, dealers, curators and collectors.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. Susan Bernofsky
PositiveThe Independent (UK)In Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck shows that it doesn\'t require a great aristocratic pile to draw readers into another world ... It\'s a Who Do You Think You Are? for bricks and mortar; a lineage of hope, despair, love and tragedy framed by an architect\'s dream weekend home ... Each story is followed by glimpses into the seasonal life of the local gardener. The result is a strangely ethereal fairy tale of the Reich-scarred, Stasi-suppressed era and its lingering hangover ... Erpenbeck has a lovely way of conjuring bittersweet images out of plaintive language ... If Visitation has a central theme, it appears to be that everything is temporary but that history will judge whether your part in the proceedings was morally sound. A Brandenburg lake house proves to be a memorable courtroom for this arbitration into the lives of others.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
PositiveThe Financial Times\"This is an affecting but strangely structured book. It begins midstream, with deconstructions of various paintings before any biographical context is provided. But, while the authorial journey as a thread feels a little flimsy at first, Knausgaard’s charm gradually takes hold. He brings a refreshing — at times comical — naivety to the rarefied art world.\
Matthew Kneale
PositiveThe Guardian\'Both peace and war have played their part in making Rome the extraordinary place it is today,\' writes Matthew Kneale. However, his stirring history of the Eternal City is heavy on the hostilities. Rome has been occupied, ravaged and reshaped by, among others, the Gauls, Goths, Normans and Nazis, plus some domestic \'sacking\' by Mussolini’s mob ... Fractured stories come naturally to Kneale...here, he carefully pieces together an episodic portrait of a population as flexible in conflict as they are in business and matrimony.
