RaveProspect MagazineA richly textured and absorbing biographical study ... Carlisle moves from novel to novel, subjecting them to the exacting lens of philosophy ... Carlisle’s intense, empathetic study reflects Eliot back to us, echoes her and rises up to meet her in order to give Eliot her philosophical due.
Tania Branigan
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Branigan’s book is investigative journalism at its best, its hard-won access eliciting deep insight. The result is a survey of China’s invisible scars that makes essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the nation today.
Kathleen Jamie
RaveThe New Statesman (UK)It is as if Jamie, wherever she goes, functions as a lightning rod, drawing past, present and future together ... Jamie’s writing has a deceptive simplicity: its powers are cumulative. Her way is to build impressionistic detail by recounting conversations, travels, observations of the natural world, and then carefully layer it in. It is its own kind of archaeology. Every now and then, however, she cuts through the assemblage of beautiful prose with a stinging comment: a reminder that the natural balance is out of whack, or that violence and menace can surface just as easily as venerable artefacts from the past ... Jamie’s apocalyptism is the quiet kind; it is gradual ageing and erosion, and a build-up of \'plastic and waste\' that will do us in. But we can also breathe the world in deeply, inhaling a beauty more precious for its fading.
Richard Beard
PositiveNew StatesmanThis memoir breaks all the rules. It’s brimful of anger and guilt, fails to deliver an uplifting ending and opens with a death ... Beard has written an enriching rather than uplifting book. It deals in difficult truths.
