MixedFinancial Times (UK)The conversation between two brothers trying to make light of their predicaments while acknowledging implicitly the momentousness of their exchange is the high point of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. There is a gravity to every joke, a progress towards an understanding and revelation of love that avoids some of the staginess and the insistence on the comic rejoinder with which Moore often stylises her dialogue ... Moore leaves the nature and purpose of these sections enigmatic ... The second half of the novel is likely to try the patience of readers of a literary-realist disposition ... The metaphors lose subtlety...and the dialogue clowns and circles itself. Perhaps that’s the intent, the first section about impending grief, the second about its incoherent madness, but the conversation between these former lovers is unlikely to affect the reader nearly as much as that of the brothers ... It is tough to be held always to the magnificent achievements of one’s best work, and this novel does contain highpoints too, full of musical phrasing and keen insight revealed in unexpected images.
Emmanuel Carrère, tr. John Lambert
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)The dramatic irony of Carrère’s intent seen in the light of his breakdown is moving ... The reader’s prurience is piqued: what happened in the middle? Frustrated as we may be by this, there is plenty of the customary pleasures of reading Carrère: a relentless clarity of thought and confessional honesty. Yoga is fascinating on the purpose of meditation, even if it doesn’t achieve its initial aim: to demonstrate its power as a defence against desire and unhappiness. Nor does it say it can’t help with this, and the book is broadly optimistic about Indian and Chinese philosophy and meditative practices, even if in this extraordinarily compelling account they are insufficiently powerful to stop Carrère from turning away from them and enduring the terrible mental ordeals he describes.
Colin Barrett
RaveFinancial TimesBarrett moves us by showing us moments of great loss as they are in the process of being managed, deflected, so they strike the character and the reader with renewed force as they emerge from stoical attempts to get on with life ... Other stories are more comic in tone, and show a lineage with Kevin Barry, another celebrated west Ireland writer ... Small-town life is claustrophobic, but can be redeemed through community. And it is in the stories of the characters who haven’t left where Barrett’s achievements are most extraordinary ... This is a beautiful and moving collection, from one of the best story writers in the English language today.
Sarah Moss
PanFinancial Times (UK)This is a short novel but it is not compressed: there is little plot and so the pages are filled with descriptions of the quotidian—laundry, gardening, looking through the fridge, baking—and with characters’ critical opinions of other people and the way they have made the world ... Kate is sympathetic in her resistance, but her anger is expressed repetitively...to the point where readers will feel like they are on the receiving end of a monologue from someone who doesn’t often get the chance to speak to other people. Which may be mimetic but isn’t entertaining ... when Alice’s boorish daughter—during an excruciating and funny Zoom dinner—threatens to ring the police, there is a strong sense of character flattening in order for the sensible point of view to wipe its feet on an absurd opinion. The solution is the disaster plot, which can’t help but be sentimental and simplifying ... The whole novel feels rushed, the waste of the talent of a novelist whose style, like all novelists, is more interesting than her opinions.
Nicole Flattery
RaveFinancial Times (UK)The stories in Nicole Flattery’s exhilarating debut are populated with women who might be the same person at different times of their lives ... Lack of money and employment are frequent problems, as are her characters’ relationships with older men ... Like her contemporary, Sally Rooney, Flattery is drawn to the power imbalances between young women and older men ... Her depiction of such relationships is more nuanced than victims and exploiters...though nor does she let men off the hook. Flattery’s judgments crackle with cruel, clear sight ... The book’s epigraph comes from Lorrie Moore, who is an obvious influence on the high-wire style, those seductive insights armoured with glittering wit against the pain they describe. Flattery writes with empathy, freedom and virtuosic technique: this debut announces the arrival of a brilliant talent.
Ben Marcus
PositiveThe Financial TimesIt is in his short stories for mainstream magazines that his fiction becomes most vital, as the form forces him to accommodate his originality of expression with the need to be intelligible. Notes from the Fog is his second collection of stories, after Leaving the Sea (2014), and both contain stories that are his best work ... People’s refusal to engage with the emotion of those closest to them is a recurrent them ... But the repetition of certain stylistic tactics aimed at avoiding cliché ultimately creates new clichés, particularly in the way he describes the human with mechanical terms ... At these moments his style greys itself with repetitive invention, and does not estrange the world in a way that lets us see it anew ... Readers will find some of the most thrilling and disturbing literary fiction of the year in this collection, though it is less successful as a whole than its best stories. Its unevenness makes one hope that Marcus might subject his own conventions to the same scrutiny to which he subjects those of realism.
Olivia Laing
MixedThe Financial Times\"Laing’s \'Kathy\' is a declaration of her own debt to Acker. But the device feels insubstantial: the details that correspond to Acker’s life are so easily separable from those that correspond to Laing’s that Acker functions more like a band T-shirt than a mask, more fetish than disguise, a declaration of the author’s gang ... there is a bounciness and wit and honest self-regard here which the earnest seriousness of Laing’s non-fiction persona didn’t always feature. But this sprezzatura voice, for all its pleasure, risks being complacent too, of lacking the empathy for which it later seems to commend itself when considering refugees and racism ... it becomes clear that Crudo embodies the echo chamber rather than offers a critique of it. Perhaps that’s what Laing intends, but at the same time the novel appears anxious to offer political critique, and the result is a disingenuous tone in which the narrator seems to rejoice in the divisions of British society while simultaneously condemning them.\
Lionel Shriver
MixedThe Financial Times\"Shriver is at her best here [in \'The Standing Chandelier], an acerbic comedian, Dickensian in style, whose vibrant characters are best seen in dramatic action and dialogue. She sees the ways selfishness can disguise itself as morality ... Flaws in the collection make themselves apparent through repetition. Shriver is spoiling for a fight. Determined to assert her right to write black characters, she focuses on their surfaces ... Taken individually, the stories are accomplished, but claustrophobia sets in as story after story puts the reader in the position of someone finding faults with another, rehearsing endlessly the argument about why other people should be different than they are. Sentences abandon concision and music to labouring the point. Character after character proselytises for him or herself for pages at a time. This may be the symptom of the age — the discourse Shriver rightly rails against — but the reader finishes the collection feeling that she is infected by it too frequently herself.\
Lisa Halliday
PositiveThe Financial TimesHalliday’s structure shows exquisite control of leitmotif and patterning; each half gradually intensifies in emotion to reach a devastating climax.
Peter Stamm, Trans. by Michael Hoffman
PositiveThe Financial TimesIn these opening sections Stamm plays with tense, beginning in the conditional (‘When Astrid realized that Thomas wasn’t lying beside her, she would suppose he was already up’) before shifting to the simple past (‘Konrad asked, Where’s Papa?’). This temporal device complicates the veracity of the narrative: are we observing how each character imagines the other’s actions, or what they are ‘really’ doing? The exact reason for his departure remains a mystery to Thomas and the reader … In Michael Hoffman’s translation, Stamm’s prose has a hypnotic quality … If the rigours of the unsettling form that Stamm has devised limit his freedom to dramatise his characters, this high-wire act between sentimentality and nihilism is nevertheless an ingenious and beautiful creation.
Roddy Doyle
RaveNew StatesmanSmile is a Trojan Horse. The tale of how a man got on with his life after an abusive childhood, in part by laughing at it, is a disguise: Doyle’s tactic is to puncture the comedy of Irish storytelling and show that it can camouflage horrific histories ...great strengths of his writing, however, are put under pressure here by a huge reversal that occurs in the last pages of the novel...a subtle excavation of a repressed consciousness suddenly employs the pyrotechnics of Gone Girl-type thrillers, praised for their unexpected twists ... A narrative explosion that burns so brightly also scorches much of value. The only reason one rereads a novel with such a twist is to ascertain that it makes sense.
Catherine Lacey
PositiveThe Financial TimesMary is to play the Emotional Girlfriend, who should ‘never disagree, challenge, or complain’; other girlfriends include the Maternal Girlfriend, and the less compliant Anger Girlfriend … The satire in these scenes is sharp and funny. The pious transactions of dating culture are taken to their logical absurdity, the search for love becoming negotiations over a contract of employment … In its second and longest section, The Answers makes a surprising switch from Mary’s point of view to an omniscient third-person narrator. Here, the novel enters the minds of the other girlfriends, particularly that of the Anger Girlfriend, traumatised in a similar way to Mary. The leap is particularly apt, occurring at the moment the sensors attached to everyone are turned on, providing Kurt and the Research Division with what they hope is a God’s-eye view of love.
Mariana Enriquez
RaveThe Financial TimesEnríquez uses supernatural elements as a metaphor for the problems of coming to terms with brutal civil repression: the fight between those for whom it’s convenient to forget and those whose losses won’t let them. The collection dramatises what it must have been like to be terrorised by the state, and the mood of claustrophobic terror extends to the stories that focus on contemporary ills, including drugs and extreme poverty ... [Enriquez] transcends the sensational plot elements to achieve a powerful and humane vision.
Samanta Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
RaveThe Financial Times\"...a short novel that wraps around itself like a mobius strip ... Supernatural plot detail always treads the thin line between silliness and expressive metaphor. But here, whenever our suspension of disbelief is strained, David is on hand to force Amanda’s and our attention back on the important question: what has been done to her and where is her daughter? ... By focusing on the terrifying suspense of this last question, [Schweblin] transcends the sensational plot elements to achieve a powerful and humane vision.\
Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund
PositiveThe Financial TimesIt’s a deeply intelligent and enjoyable correspondence: superb analyses of games acknowledge the limitations of such accounts — 'Writing about football is actually nonsense. All the pleasure lies in seeing it unfold' — and both men are quick to leap on to art and politics ... Knausgaard evades his own stereotype of himself as a puritan. His portrayal of life at home with his wife and four children, running his publishing house, travelling to speak at events, evokes a quiet, vivid and sociable happiness. The man who never laughs is frequently very funny.
Javier Marias, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
PositiveThe Financial Times\"The noirish plot detail provides a satisfying framework and counterpoint for a different type of novel, one full of philosophical speculation and digression ... one of Marías’s most enjoyable and accessible novels. The trademark digressions, fascinating reflections on the psychological effects of civil war, are harmoniously balanced with the events of the narrative ... If there is a criticism, it is that this is a particularly male view of the Franco years and their sequel. Acknowledging that the dictatorship tried to disempower women, Marías enacts this on the page by making Beatriz all but voiceless.\
Geoff Dyer
PositiveThe Financial TimesDyer’s writing is energised by disappointment, switching smoothly from comic exasperation to cosmic sorrow ... With his customary elegance of thought, he sees that our attempts to transcend our situation through travel and art are motivated by our awareness of our final destination: 'We are here to go somewhere else.'
Karan Mahajan
RaveThe Financial TimesMahajan has the splinter of ice in his heart that Greene said one needed to write truthfully about tragedy. The novel is cruel in what it notices about us, in what it gets right. It is also brave enough to portray fallible victims and then show sympathy when describing terrorist[s] ... This is a superb novel despite occasional longueurs.
Tony Tulathimutte
PositiveThe Financial TimesTulathimutte has an ear for the new-age language of personal empowerment that is turned to justify the selfishness of capitalism. His clever characters analyse themselves and each other — using their academic intelligence to diagnose their unhappiness. But at times this analysis is overdone ... Dialogue elsewhere is superb: the language of 'tech-bros' and 'marketing ronins' is brilliantly recreated. His pacy storytelling recalls Jeffrey Eugenides, in particular The Marriage Plot: graduates full of theory and ideals, trying them out against capitalism for the first time, each novel featuring a tall manic depressive a little like Wallace. To mention Tulathimutte in such company suggests what a promising debut this is: it may have a few weak notes, but shows prodigious talent and intelligence.
