RaveSouth China Morning (CHIN)While Li’s prose is exquisite after a precise fashion, it never blows its own unflashy horn ... Lilia’s voice sounds like a parody of Li’s own characteristically laser-guided prose, only with the author’s humane reserve replaced by a pugnacious, judgmental, if world-weary wit ... Her own novel’s relationship to the truth transcends anyone’s personal interest or any one version of the truth, including that of the writer and the reader. The story doesn’t want to be remembered any more than it wants to be seen, but by seeing and remembering in its own way stands the best chance of achieving both ... this closely observed, slyly comic and quietly gripping story will do just fine for our difficult present.
Hilary Mantel
PositiveThe South China Morning Post (CHI)With so much ground to cover, Mantel tests our patience as never before, in terms of heft and complexity. That she avoids testing us, too, says a lot about her prose, whose present-tense immediacy creates nerve-jangling drama. No matter how smartly Cromwell tries to predict events, he walks in semi-blindness along paths of eggshells, wondering whether the doorway ahead is booby-trapped or the means to salvation ... If this is Mantel’s way of demystifying familiar history, she renders the general mood of paranoid plotting with supple changes of perspective. Cromwell’s quicksilver calculations dominate, but she can inhabit other points of view with disarming speed: on more than one occasion she has to clarify which “he” exactly we are eavesdropping upon...We could read this as clumsy failure of style, or the inevitable consequence of a feudal patriarchy that habitually uses, abuses and kills women ... What impresses is how Mantel tracks the slow disintegration of the alliance through seemingly innocuous silences or praise bestowed on rivals ... For all its longueurs, The Mirror & the Light is a fitting climax to a dazzling trilogy.
Atticus Lish
RaveThe Independent (UK)The 2015 novel I can’t believe I missed ... Lish is singularly alive to the ways that bodies are marked by experience ... Lish writes unnervingly well about violence. The nightmares that haunt Skinner’s sleep are conveyed with woozy intensity ... This unflinching physicality does not disguise how intently Lish gazes at symbolic horizons ... Although the novel is frequently sad to the point of despair, its power derives too from Zou and Skinner’s desperation to find goodness, hope and a future together ... Preparation for the Next Life is extraordinary, challenging and in its final quarter thrilling in ways Michael Connelly would envy. It is not perfect. Lish’s prose occasionally topples under its own weightiness ... But other passages live long in the memory ... Mostly, however, you remember Zou and Skinner, star-crossed lovers who cling to each other because there is no one else ... So simple, so heart-breaking, so very, very good.
