PositiveTimes Literary Supplement\"Tics aside, William Boyd is endlessly versatile, and the many readers to whom he has given such pleasure will eagerly await the next development. To my mind his best mode is comedy ... All of these novels concern likeable, if slightly roguish or bumbling, heroes who get into a hot mess, but somehow or other climb out. Hot mess is colloquially applied to women, but the author’s expertise is in male crisis, these days a rather underexamined subject.\
Teju Cole
PositiveThe GuardianAlong with seemingly profound reflections on cultural forms, descriptions of these walks constitute most of Open City, the first full-length novel by Teju Cole, which has been much praised in the United States for its prose style and for its take on the city as a site of power, desire and community ...action is the wrong spoor by which to pursue this book. What comes strongest off it, instead, is a cosmopolitan range of reference. Moments of genuine narrative are most often the springboard for a jump into book chat, music trivia or historical disquisition ... The environment of which Open City is mostly mimetic is the hall of semiotic mirrors inside our heads, and the proliferating data now so easily accessed by our fingertips.
John Le Carré
PositiveThe GuardianWhat kind of job, you also want to ask, in medias res, is The Constant Gardener? What are the connections between this novel's story and the real-world stories around and before it? Right at the start, mention is made of ‘the sensational case of a young Englishwoman who had been hacked to pieces 10 years ago’ — a clear reference to the Julie Ward case. It doesn't take too much effort to find parallels between le Carré's pharmas and actual ones, either … This is newish ground for one of Britain's most skilful writers, and he works it very well. The enterprise is marred only by constant sniping references to the press … The literary characters at least are fascinating…[and] the African details feel as right and true as the British ones.
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