RaveThe Guardian (UK)Haunting ... A paean to the beauty and hardship present in his native Ethiopia, but also alive and present in every corner of the United States.
Neel Mukherjee
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMukherjee is brilliant at tracing the ways a choice deferred becomes a fate sealed. But the book’s tripartite structure is even better at showing how we graze one another’s lives with our decisions, some of which may be catastrophic for our conscience but beneficial for our art ... A lesser writer would offer only pathos. Mukherjee is alive to all that — but also to the rich, cruel comedy of being saddled with an asset you can’t digest, a gift that costs you everything, a choice you can’t unmake.
Nathan Hill
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)As a stylist, Hill lands on his feet most of the time ... There are times when this digressive novel sags under the weight of its own constantly proliferating climaxes and coincidences. It’s also the kind of novel where you learn absolutely everyone’s hair colour ... Yet, Hill’s penchant for super-abundance equips him well for the task of capturing the contours of modern American life. Wellness is the kind of novel that feels genuinely capacious and lively, full of interconnected rooms stuffed with unexpected fascinations.
William Boyd
RaveThe Guardian (UK)One of the many pleasures of Boyd’s fiction is that history doesn’t just happen around his characters – it happens to them ... Boyd has a brilliant comic ear for posterity’s most absurd possibilities ... The sentences – even the death sentences – thrum with life.
Hernan Diaz
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... poses questions of authorship and ownership at every turn: when did wealth become the defining element of every American success story? What values and costs can be ascribed to the \'Great Man\' theory of history? And to whom do such men owe their greatest debts? If you imagine a brilliantly twisted mix of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Virginia Woolf’s journals, JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Ryan Gosling’s breaking of the fourth wall in The Big Short, you’ll get some sense of the surprising hybrid Diaz has created ... A Borgesian sense of play imbues almost every page of Trust, along with a dash of Italo Calvino’s love of exploring different versions of a single idea or city. Through perfectly formed sentences and the skilful unpicking of certainties, Trust creates a great portrait of New York across an entire century of change ... so packed full of ironies that it can sometimes feel airless. But it is also a work possessed of real power and purpose. It invites us to think about why the category of imaginative play we most heavily reward as a society is the playing of financial markets, often at a heavy cost. It’s a testament to Diaz’s cunning abilities as a writer that you end his book thinking that – if truth is your goal – you might be better off relying on a novelist than a banker.
Lan Samantha Chang
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The Family Chao has a laser focus: one restaurant, one town, and one crime that will transform the family’s fortunes ... you get the sense that borrowing the bones of a classic [The Brothers Karamazov has freed up the author to focus on making every interior detail as perfect as it can be. One of the many pleasures of The Family Chao is the way the novel dramatises the gap between how a family wants to be seen, and its messier inner realities ... Chang has created a wonderful comedy of American consumption ... Chang’s prose moves with the unfussy ease of a shark through water—for the longest time you are just enjoying your swim, soaking up the story. Only midway through the book does it occur to you that a master hunter is at work: a writer cutting through the darker depths of what it means to be treated as an outsider in America ... Chang’s omniscient narrator tell us, \'there are many ways to greatness. There’s greatness of style, of setting, of occasion, and of company.\' The Family Chao has a little of all these ingredients—but even better, it arrives with something to say.
Eimear McBride
PositiveThe Financial TimesFor better or worse, this new novel is a more predictable beast, and occasionally we fall into a pop-song summary of events that lacks all the intensity and strange specificity that raised her first novel so far above ordinariness ... Balanced against such passages, however, are images that remind us of the fact McBride is one of the most exciting literary talents to emerge in the last few years ... McBride proves expert at capturing the headlong sense of power and powerlessness that a person experiences when falling in love for the first time ... This may not be Eimear McBride’s strongest book, but moments of highly specific, deeply felt experience remind us what she can do.
Patrick Flanery
MixedThe New York Times Book Review...as the plot begins to creak through various twists and turns, stage-managed either by the author or his unreliable narrator, Jeremy can sound more like a nervous novelist than a traumatized professor ... Flanery is a writer capable of delicately layering elements of the surreal and absurd into his work, but in this novel the themes can seem rather thickly laid, prioritized over the characters and their sentences ... The instances of more aloof, detached narration tend to carry the book’s ideas forward with greater force, leaving us feeling we’re wired to a cold security camera and its fascinating, unfinished footage of events.
