PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)\"Shafak is at home composing stories from multiple perspectives, and here moves easily between Arthur, Zaleekhah and Narin, but what grows between them is a confluence of themes and coincidences that, while illuminating the magic of storytelling, comes with a cost. Eager to uncover the connections between her characters’ lives, Shafak doesn’t give herself enough time to linger inside their heads. Nonetheless, she also remains loyal to reality’s refusal to be neatly tied up. She often leaves loose ends – unusually for a writer who relies so heavily on plot for momentum – and There are Rivers in the Sky is no exception. What happens to Narin’s father? Is the final transaction undertaken by Zaleekhah and Nen as morally clear-cut as we might so easily believe? And if her characters live on, complicatedly, beyond the page, she thereby leaves her readers with a bleak question: in such fractured and violent times, what kind of stories are we leaving for future generations to tell?\
Rosalind Brown
MixedThe Telegraph (UK)While Brown’s skill in turning words is evident, her audacity in composing Practice entirely of Annabel’s thoughts is the book’s greatest vulnerability, as it risks pushing out readers who don’t chime with her. Meanwhile, its context is just as narrowly focused: Annabel is locked into the particularities of the Oxford essay cycle ... Whether its psychological depth and nuance succeeds in opening out into a more general study of the tension between outwardly-lived and interior lives, I’m not wholly convinced.
Banine, trans. by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
PositiveThe Arts DeskThe sharp, witty humour with which she conveys this colourful cast and rambunctious environment hints at just how close tragedy hovered during this decade and a half of monumental change. Humorous episodes and terrible revelations alike, her playful narration defuses the threat that drives the freneticism of both kinds of event ... Banine’s witty observations puncture pieties and preconceptions. She has a wickedly whetted tongue, and enough self-awareness to refuse sparing herself from her own reflections ... Her writing is gorgeously translated (from the French) by Anne Thomson-Ahmadova who spent twenty years living in Baku and it’s only to be hoped that more of her works are translated as a result.
