About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jonathan Lethem
Rave The Guardian (UK) A fictionalised memoir channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes that jump around in time, a fractured and granular narrative with a plurality of vocal tics ... Given his genre-bending proclivities, it’s no surprise that Lethem makes a bold grab at the fashionable mode of autofiction. Adding some deadpan sparkle to a form that can often be flat and drab, he comes up with something truly compelling.
Colson Whitehead
Rave The Guardian (UK) [A] finely tuned sense of history ... Whitehead deploys a clipped and hard-boiled style that can pick up the pace at any moment, yet there’s a meditative, internalised element to his prose that puts us inside the action, allowing for reflection and candour among its participants ... Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire.
Deepti Kapoor
Rave The Guardian (UK) An impressively ambitious literary thriller ... An epic story ... With intricate yet plausible plotting, the book has all the energy of a high-concept crime thriller. What makes it compelling is the emotional intelligence of Kapoor’s characterisations ... Now seems a good time to examine the underbelly of India’s capitalist system from the inside, and Kapoor clearly knows her subject well. The feel of authenticity she brings to this fictional world gives it real political and moral weight ... The real suspense is found in the power dynamics that motivate the brutality, putting its players in constant jeopardy. Kapoor writes with a spare, hard-boiled style, fuelling the pace of her narrative but allowing for starkly lyrical touches as well.
Percival Everett
Rave The Guardian (UK) ... a harsher, more unmediated satire, a fast-paced comedy with elements of crime and horror that directly addresses racism in a boldly shocking manner ... As the tone becomes disturbingly gruesome, a deeper purpose to this cruel humour emerges ... this is not so much a mystery to be solved, rather a greater crime to be addressed: a police procedural that investigates the lack of any due process in the past, where the crime scene is history itself ... The genius of this novel is that in an age of reactionary populism it goes on the offensive, using popular forms to address a deep political issue as page-turning comic horror. It’s a powerful wake-up call, as well as an act of literary restitution.
Robert Galbraith
Mixed The Guardian At nearly 650 pages, it’s a big book and it certainly doesn’t lack ambition ... Strike is a wonderfully complex creature, with just the right balance of contradictions to guide us through this labyrinthine world ... He’s one of those lost souls who joined the army in search of family, an outsider who knows the belly of the beast. And the time taken in describing the day-to-day workings of his craft ensures that he’s plausible enough in his occupation ... But one suspects that Galbraith might have been a little more rigorously edited were he not the alter ego of our most successful living writer. The central murder doesn’t happen until nearly 300 pages in; while the slow burn to the plot shows admirable restraint, all the detail—the exposition and the setups that hint at withheld information—creates a sense of inertia. The sentence structure is more soft-boiled than hard-boiled ... There is a discursive delight in many meticulously descriptive passages, but they keep us detached from what might be at the heart of this novel ... Strike is richly drawn, Robin is a little on the dull side ... whereas each flaw of Strike is lovingly detailed, all the women who fall for his rough charm (and there are a great many) are predictably conventional in their attractiveness ... Nevertheless, the Galbraith/Rowling persona does make for highly inventive storytelling and there is much here for mystery fans to enjoy. So many twists, turns, false leads and red herrings: seldom has a denouement been more worthy of its original meaning, literally the \'unknotting.\'
Chuck Palahniuk
Mixed The Guardian Palahniuk’s critique of masculinity works best when it manages to be homoerotic at the same time. Here there’s a sense of visceral romanticism to his writing, that he has some skin in the game ... But about 100 pages in there’s a plot twist ... Suddenly we’re caught up in a very long-winded satire on race and sexual identity. You can’t fault Palahniuk’s ambition in wanting to create a grand dystopia for his nation, but he spends too much time and effort on the detail of how these subdivisions come into being and how they function, all confusingly depicted by multiple narrative strands ... he clearly wants to shock. There are copious amount of sex and violence in Adjustment Day, presented in such a detached manner that the effect is more numbing than disturbing ... Part of the problem could be that he already feels he’s passed judgment on millennials ... What’s lacking in Adjustment Day is his heart.