RaveThe Guardian (UK)Irresistible ... The kind of book that, for a certain kind of reader, will immediately become a treasure ... This is a book for people who...love Nancy Mitford, the Cazalet Chronicles and The Line of Beauty ... That these are Stanley’s literary inspirations is so evident that her novel almost feels like a kind of homage: not just in the funny, brisk, tender texture of her writing, but also in the upper middle-class world she details with such care ... Stanley is clearly deeply interested in global affairs...and it does not always work seamlessly for the regular reader ... Yet by grounding the novel in such a specific time and place, Stanley makes us believe that at least for these two characters—and perhaps the rest of us, too—the political and personal are inextricably braided together.
Kaliane Bradley
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about ... While Bradley’s writing can veer towards the glib, go with it: give in to the tide of this book, and let it pull you along. It’s very smart; it’s very silly; and the obvious fun never obscures completely the sheer, gorgeous, wild stretch of her ideas.
Keiran Goddard
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Keiran Goddard has written something like the universal love story ... No pain is unique, and all pain is unique. This is the paradox that powers Hourglass. I have rarely read a book that captures so succinctly the way that all lovers must (at least a little bit) believe they are the only people to ever feel this feeling, and the way that that is (at least a little bit) true ... The world of Goddard’s novel exists vividly on the page and yet to the narrator he is the only real person in it ... Hourglass sits somewhere between prose and poetry.
Esther Freud
RaveThe GuardianThough written in three timelines – each mostly compelling in their own right – this is Kate’s story. But to what extent are our stories ever our own? ... It is tempting to map Freud’s real-life family (tempestuous sculptor Lucian, for example) on to the novel’s complex interplay of characters, but to pin this book down as autobiographical does it a great disservice. I Couldn’t Love You More is a crafted novel, made with great skill and attention, the way Felix makes his sculptures, the way Kate makes her painted trees ... You want, instinctively, to say that this is a book of echoes, but nothing could be further from the truth. Things are much more real than echoes. Each generation of women lives wholly, not merely as shadows of the other but completely themselves. The novel is about the patterns of being in this one family; and the patterns of being a woman; and the patterns of being a person, wherever and whenever we are alive.
