RaveThe GuardianThe title story of Tessa Hadley’s outstanding new collection sits at the heart of the book. It is exquisite, haunting and serves as something of an index to the whole ... Hadley captures, beautifully, the feeling of events unfolding – often unanticipated, unpredictable – and is alert to the stream of recalibrations and negotiations at play as her characters try to process new experience ... Bad Dreams is remarkable not only for Hadley’s penetrating engagement with her subject matter, but for her extraordinary and distinctive range. It combines acerbic social observation and wry humour with moments of breathtaking delicacy and tenderness. This is a collection to be read and reread.
Lesley Nneka Arimah
RaveThe GuardianOne of the pleasures of reading Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut collection is the feeling of being thrown off balance: not knowing where this playful and adventurous new talent will take you next ... Arimah’s focus is on the lives of girls and women, and while her perspective is often bleak, the collection is bracing and varied ...a debut writer showing serious range – drawing on realism, magical realism, the fantastic and speculative, myth and fable ... The seam of bleakness running through the book concerns the diminishment of women: an outcome which starts to appear almost inevitable, even for girls born brave and quick-witted... While at times her use of narrative or rhetorical devices brings a degree of self-consciousness to the page, it also brings energy, momentum and humour ... Here, and elsewhere, Arimah captures a sense of time and change as chaotic, fast and unsparing – slippery, and out of our hands.
