About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Camille Bordas
Positive The Observer (UK) This is a novel about artists and what they think about all day – and it doesn’t exactly demolish any myths that their every waking moment is spent self-examining and remembering and theorising. I’m no standup so I can’t comment on the veracity of this, but it seems an exhausting way to live, let alone make a living. Is this what Bordas wants us to feel? But with its determinedly meandering plotlessness, the novel will ultimately stand (up) or fall depending on how much it makes you laugh.
Nathan Hill
Rave The Guardian (UK) ome writers might stagger and cave under the weight of so many ideas and possibilities, but not Hill. The quiet genius of his writing is that he takes the reader effortlessly into every one of these worlds ... The result is utterly immersive: you simply have to turn the page, unravel more.
A. M. Homes
Mixed The Observer (UK) There’s little or no foreshadowing and the resulting story twist seems to have arrived from another book ... What’s more, the time setting seems strange on two counts. Yes, Christmas 2008 was a political shock – but the far bigger shock reverberating round the world at the time was surely the financial meltdown. These people are all super-rich, so why isn’t there a single mention of what it might be doing to their trust funds? And then there’s the conspiracy itself: in interviews, Homes tells us it was conceived and written before the Donald threw his comb-over into the ring. So, with her storyline undercut by events, we seem to be left with a nostalgic plea for ordinary decent plotters who might have had the decency to seize power the old-fashioned way with tanks and marines instead of mesmerising half the country with Twitter and then sending in shamans and Proud Boys to storm the citadel.
Audrey Magee
Rave The Guardian Following in the literary tradition of Synge, Trevor and Tóibín, The Colony portrays Irish lives cornered by the dead weight of tradition...Characters do very little very slowly and discontents are expressed sardonically or obliquely, if at all...Naturally, there’s also an equally traditional smattering of merciless killing and colonising foreigners...And Magee’s setting is traditionally remote, an Atlantic island off Ireland’s west coast, three miles long, with its 1979 population now down to double figures...Magee’s prose is always luminous, lyrical and pungent: sometimes sliding into vertical columns of one-word paragraphs, sometimes dwelling on the minutiae of rabbit gutting or the smell of Prussian blue, and yet always remaining ever so slightly distanced...And it would be wrong to say the book rises to a climax: in true Irish tradition, the story shrinks back to its status quo ante...Lloyd sails back \'to Freud, to Auerbach, to Bacon,\' JP’s professorship is in the bag and that very special Irish melancholy settles again over the island.
Alison MacLeod
Positive The Observer (UK) ... arresting ... This is a documentary-style novel in the tradition of John Dos Passos or Vasily Grossman, with tinges of Didion and Mailer to brighten the way ... There is so much to enjoy here, and it’s only when MacLeod attempts the inner imaginings of the power players that the prose becomes less wieldy ... And the novel could perhaps have done without so many pages amounting to little more than court transcript with added adverbs or biographical summation – the Greatham colony sequence quickly turns into a biblical deluge of famous names ... MacLeod’s novel is at its best when it stops and dwells on all of the imagined encounters, allowing them room to blossom and give us some genuine, and genuinely convincing, moments where humans seek to find and show tenderness for one another. After all, Tenderness was Lawrence’s alternative title for Lady Chatterley.
Tom McCarthy
Pan The Observer (UK) \" McCarthy tells us nothing about the rest of Dean’s life, creates no narrative that might show us how this episode enlarges or diminishes her. The modern novel thrives on moments when an individual behaves out of character but Dean, like everyone else in the book, is only shown doing what she’s employed to do. So what, novelistically speaking, is in it for the reader? Meanwhile, Phocan spends 23 pages watching a bobsleigh team make use of a digitised wind tunnel ... a novel must surely enable us to invest in the central characters’ aspirations or failings or loves and losses ... having lured us with work lives packed with IP, IT and CGI, he offers no enigma, no insight. We are left with what the characters are employed to do, nine to five, and little more. It’s minutely described and probably realistic, but is that a novel?\
Gary Shteyngart
Pan The Observer (UK) I have met people, mercifully few in number, who just don’t respond to Chekhov ... They’ll ask what all the fuss is about: a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving even less? And perhaps now, with Gary Shteyngart’s latest book, I’m beginning to understand their bewilderment. Our Country Friends, a Chekhov-inspired Covid novel, comes lauded with every form of praise from serious Americans...and yet here I am...wondering what I’m missing ... The American praise quoted on the dust jacket promises a \'brilliant\' \'laugh out loud\' tragicomedy, but I didn’t laugh and I didn’t cry. I wonder if too many of its culture-war references...simply lack the same pungency for a British readership. The friction between self-regarding Manhattan creatives and barely managing upstate farmers should be fertile enough ground for any novelist, but I constantly felt as though I’d forgotten to pack the codebook. Which left me with the mere domestic shenanigans of the characters, namely a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving less.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Observer (UK) They say good things come in threes and although it feels as though this latest novel about Lucy Barton marks the completion of a trilogy, can I put in an early request? For a tetralogy, a pentalogy or whatever comes after that? ... Elizabeth Strout seems to be generating a...holistic – and entirely original – form of fiction writing ... Strout is constantly weaving new strands alongside the main narrative, skidding backwards and forwards in time, but also – and satisfyingly – sideways to siblings, to neighbours, to offspring ... The novel’s cunning complexity reveals itself. Strout, as ever, does not rely on plot, instead stuttering between randomly remembered moments, whether a panicky evasion or an incomplete conversation, which build the picture of a shared life and its lonely aftermath. Though to label them random undersells the quiet virtuosity: what we have here are exquisitely choreographed flashes of lightning that illuminate the confusion and contradictions and misjudgements of any marriage. And without the usual kind of narrative dilemma waiting to be satisfied, the intense pleasure of Strout’s writing becomes the simple joy of learning more while – always – understanding less.
Joshua Ferris
Rave The Observer (UK) Any novelist is fiercely impelled to give their story a shape, to mould a satisfying journey along which ends are tied and consequences paid out. And yet part of the genius of this shape-shifting fourth novel from the Booker-shortlisted Ferris is that – just like his protagonist Charlie Barnes’s life – it’s a sprawling, confounding mess ... provides a slow-burning clue as to how the novel might flip for the final third. And when it does, it’s hard not to catch your breath in admiration. Because in Ferris’s admirably risk-taking hands, this novel becomes so much more than simply another story of failed American dreams. Ferris has made himself into the leading writer of the American workplace...He understands both its absurdities (and this is another very funny book) and its rewards, but most of all he understands how it shapes modern America.
Jon McGregor
Mixed The Guardian (UK) ... the slow, agonising return journey from a stroke ... McGregor impeccably captures the thankless, sisyphean nature of a carer’s life ... [a] bravura chorus of She Hads runs for two unbroken pages and exquisitely captures the endless torture of it. But soon the doggedly performative nature of his prose, ascetically choosing to reduce his remit to Anna’s actions, starts to fall short. Yes, he effortlessly evokes the unstinting grind, with each step forward often followed by two backwards, but a reader craves to be more than a GoPro clipped to a protagonist’s lapel. Quite simply, I wanted to know what it actually feels like for Anna—emails from her colleagues back-seating her at the big conference are not enough. There are sporadic glimpses of her frustrated despair ... Is it heartless to say that a little aphasia goes a long way? Or is it that, without any countervailing scenes where anger or despair or guilt explode and take centre stage, the mere daily slog becomes a slog?
Joy Williams
Positive The Guardian (UK) Williams has a delicious ability to land a gnomic assertion and then watch its inherent contradictions twist in the wind. Harrow is less immediately witty – maybe because the tangible reference points are so distant, so surrealised, that the contradictions are inevitably less immediate – but the overall picture is intense, disturbing and always questioning ... this whole book feels as though it is set in a kind of limbo, a period when mankind must decide which way it wants to turn: down to a slow death in the hell of Disneyland or up to resurrection by caring for a planet that otherwise seems doomed.
Leila Slimani tr. Sam Taylor
Mixed The Guardian (UK) The book is certainly as wild and lush as a wildflower meadow, the characters and their backstories bursting with random aplomb from the grass. But just as there are a thousand ways to meander through a meadow, there’s no clear path through this multi-focused book either ... With such rich material, it’s a shame that Slimani’s research is sometimes worn heavily ... At other times, the writing is careless ... It’s hard not to feel that Slimani has relinquished her pinpoint writer’s eye and fallen fatally under the spell of this redolent but personal material. Incidents are included even though they seem to have no pay-off, while events with genuine narrative consequence are muscled out by the next anecdote.