About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Peter Frankopan
Positive Irish Times (IRE) A lively, absorbing account of not only how humans have potentially shaped but also been shaped by the climate ... Frankopan’s many and fascinating hypotheses mean that The Earth Transformed is a robust scholarly tome, as well as an engaging and sustaining read over its 650-plus pages ... Some of the writing is clumsy. He occasionally lacks nuance, and his arguments can sometimes be reductive to fit his claims.
Konstantin Paustovsky, trans. by Douglas Smith
Positive Irish Times (IRE) Lyrical ... Epic ... Paustovsky’s prose can border on the florid but here his adjectives sustain pace as well as develop imagery. The accumulation of repeated and selected adjectives...not only gives a devastating image of the soldiers, but a sense of the exhausting nature of the work. It’s when Paustovsky tries to make grander, more generalised philosophical statements that the narrative becomes stilted.
Lucy Ellmann
Positive Cleveland Review of Books We discern certain events that happen to her, but what we’re given access to in the form of this nameless narrator is a rather extraordinary depiction of a mind that resembles a swirling nebulous of information, and thoughts returning and doubling back on themselves over and over ... philosophic and inventive whilst being writhed with a scathing humor ... The narrator’s mind in Ducks retains all that which causes her pain and sadness—as well as joy—and it’s not always a choice, not always a pleasant narrative that we can tell to and about ourselves, about those choices and about future choices, that allow us to master them ... the time you’ll have with this novel, whether that be a long or short period, is the kind of time you’d spend with a companion in that it becomes secondary to how much more those moments represent.
Angela Readman
Positive Full Stop ... it’s incidental to the comparisons that have been drawn with Angela Carter, and one can see why with the plethora of animal and fairy-tale symbolism that seems to lie beneath the story ... Whilst Readman’s taste isn’t as baroque as Carter’s, there’s a sense that sexual knowledge comes with a sacrifice ... there are some really lovely images deployed throughout Something Like Breathing, and although Readman might be criticized for an overuse of similes, some of them truly glow in your mind after finishing the novel.