PanFinancial Times (UK)The book’s attempt to charm has the opposite effect. The mad excess Greer seems to be aiming for in his extended early descriptions of the villa, for instance, is tiresome and stodgy — and this from a writer usually so light of touch ... There is only a story of friendship to give order to the chaos, with the result that when events of significance do happen — a sudden death, a daring heist, incriminating revelations about the fictional Baronessa’s past — they get lost in the crush.
RaveFinancial Times (UK)The protagonists’ shared ambition is almost a match for the author’s. Spanning 17 years and some 500 pages, Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon’s friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ... The real delight of Drayton and Mackenzie is the relationship of its leads. This evolves as you’d expect — beginning in incomprehension and developing into something unbreakable — yet is so beautifully done, I’ll admit my vision wasn’t the clearest by the end. (Seriously, if you thought Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies was sad . . .) I don’t know how Starritt is going to top this one.
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)Superb ... Follows one man’s ‘crisis’ road trip with touches of humour and devastation.
Scott Preston
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)A tremendously exciting novel. Rarely making us wait more than twenty pages between set pieces, it executes these with such blood-pumping aplomb that we are grateful for the breathers at the end of them. Then there is the brilliantly realized voice ... Blunt and brutal.
Jonathan Buckley
RaveThe Financial TimesThe interview conceit in Tell makes it feel fresh, the withholding of interiority requiring an unusual engagement. Don’t take the conversational prose at face value; underneath it lies a whole other set of mysteries besides Curtis’s.
Colin Barrett
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)I would say I was unable to put Wild Houses down, but I was constantly putting it down, to make a note of a new word or felicitous phrase ... Colin Barrett’s short stories can sometimes be too heavy on the show-stopping detail. Here he keeps his descriptive powers on a shorter leash; when he does let fly, it connects.
Tessa Hadley
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)Families are at the heart of all 12 of these stories, but the subject never gets old in Hadley’s hands ... My one reservation about this collection, which I share about the three preceding it, are its first-personal stories. I never feel Hadley is as psychologically penetrating in the first person as she is in the third ... The failing doesn’t detract significantly from an otherwise magnificent collection.
James Greer
PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Greer delights in these collisions of fact and fiction. Not all readers will ... it is all very Thomas Pynchon...And, as in Pynchon, Bad Eminence displays a byzantine vocabulary that will have you reaching for the dictionary on just about every other page. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, Greer’s novels reek of the thesaurus in a way that Pynchon’s never do. The problem is the voice. Funny to start with, Vanessa’s first person is so flippant and wisecracking that it steamrolls every attempt at sincerity and makes the big words and metafictional games seem like nothing more than what they are.
