RaveThe Telegraph (UK)Comprehensive ... Hughes-Hallett’s biography is the first, properly good account since Roger Lockyer’s monumental tome in 1981 ... Delightfully fleet-footed double biography of both Buckingham and the topsy-turvy Jacobean era he helped shape.
Alan Hollinghurst
PanThe Spectator (UK)Does nothing new. The plot is one of tedious familiarity ... The worst thing about the novel is how boring it is.
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe Spectator (UK)This is a novel of detail, describing scans and the difficulty of performing simple bodily tasks ... We end up back outside the hospital; but much has changed. This is a quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details.
Andrew O'Hagan
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSweeping ... A novel this broad has to move quickly, and depend on speech to deliver key details. O’Hagan’s dialogue can feel stilted and unnatural ... A rich, moving attempt to listen to the swell of human life, but O’Hagan occasionally falls into the same trap as his protagonist.
Colin Barrett
RaveThe Spectator\"Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses, is, then, a delight, with a wider space for his talent to spread and for his acutely observed characters to linger ... This is less a plot-driven novel than a study of an intricate web of characters ... For all Barrett’s commitment to chronicling the details of disempowered lives, there’s something folkloric about Wild Houses. It doesn’t spoil too much to reveal that at the root of this warfare between drug dealers is a magical lake which appears out of nowhere. Yet there’s no whimsy. Like all dark folk tales, Wild Houses turns its storytelling to exploitation, broken promises and only half-happy endings.\
Johanna Hedman, trans. Kira Josefsson
PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The novel has a fractured, unwieldy structure that echoes the relationships it describes: tortuously unbalanced, full of collisions and silences ... The novel’s nostalgic tone leaves it vulnerable to indulgence, and the time-jump framing device... is undeveloped to the point of near-redundancy ... Along with the vast passages of purple prose... the academic register of Hedman’s student characters begins to grate.
Diane Williams
RaveThe Spectator (UK)Amid baffling, bizarre images and seeming non-sequiturs, Williams captures the mundanity of every-day life in surprising and electrifying ways.
Sophie Mackintosh
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Disconcerting, dreamlike ... Described with linguistic precision and cinematic patience ... A clever investigation into narrative form: how it shapes and propels a story, and its vulnerability in the hands of the person who tells it.
Yiyun Li
RaveThe Spectator (UK)\"This is a novel of deceptions and cruelty. Agnès is a ‘faux prodigy’, her ‘big dreams’ can never materialise and her life is stalked by tragedy. But within this sombre mood is something brilliant. With characteristic poise, Li depicts the intricacies of ordinary lives: childhood friendship, growing up, and existences as slow as the passively ‘floating’ geese Agnès watches. ‘Any experience is experience, any life a life’, writes Li. When it’s this well told, it’s impossible not to agree.\
Maggie O'Farrell
MixedThe Spectator (UK)... sombre, haunting ... In O’Farrell’s hands historical detail comes alive. She deftly imagines Lucrezia’s childhood in the palazzo in Florence and her later marriage in Ferrara ... The novel is evocative and moving. The aspects of Browning’s poem which can seem far-fetched or comedic (the duchess riding around in her pre-death captivity on a white mule) are sensitively rendered. But, the narrative still falters. Some of the sex scenes are all but unreadable (‘the river god is enacting his nightly ritual, seeking that mysterious and necessary relief’), and the conclusion – mistaken identity and a similar looking maid – feels too neat and insubstantial ... O’Farrell has drawn back the curtain on this marriage portrait, but there’s an unmistakable sense that the painting hasn’t quite been finished.
