PositiveiNews (UK)I enjoy the rhythms of Smith’s long sentences but there is sometimes a sense that she is coasting as a stylist. She uses repetition to such an extent that it can feel like an effect instead of an experiment ... Even so, Smith’s prose can still be enthralling ... The book’s political commitment has undeniable power, with its anger at sexual violence and the indirect violence of poverty and exploitation. But this is a confusing novel about confusing times. At one point, Sandy says she is \'beyond caring\' about the state of the world, even though it is obvious that she cares deeply. Readers will recognise this paradoxical feeling but they may also find that, as well as being exhausting to experience, it is baffling and gruelling to read about ... merely reflects our current malaise, it doesn’t subvert it. It is a symptom of the time that never quite becomes the profound reckoning it wants to be.
Colin Barrett
RaveiNews (UK)Is home a time as much as a place? Does a disaffection take root when you stay close to home for too long? Such questions linger in the mind after reading these eight stories ... Where that first collection told with panache the stories of young petty criminals in a fictional part of Ireland, Homesickness feels more grounded, in part due to its real setting, gentler pace and concern with older characters ... You could open Homesickness at any page and find sentences of vim and elegance, ringing dialogue ... These characters may exist on the margins, but Barrett puts them at the centre of their own worlds.
Jennifer Egan
MixediNews (UK)If, as Egan said, Goon Squad was inspired by Marcel Proust and The Sopranos, The Candy House reads like what might have happened had Thomas Pynchon been in the writers’ room for the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… (not necessarily a bad thing), with Egan both a streetwise satirist and a sensitive chronicler of the way people age ... When Egan lets fly with this kind of hypnotic stream-of-consciousness narration, she is like an improvising jazz musician, taking readers on a revelatory ride. I wish she would stick with one protagonist for an entire novel in this mode and drop the stale experiments ... At the level of the sentence, The Candy House zings, but it does not cohere as successfully as its sibling. I became lost in passages of brilliance, but there is also a sense of Egan working through artistic difficulties ... If it were a record, The Candy House would be an album of
demos and outtakes – of interest to completists, but perhaps not to anyone else.
Hanya Yanagihara
PositiveiNews (UK)Readers should not be daunted by its length though because, after a few initial problems, it moves quickly, thanks to Yanagihara’s unflagging prose and assured storytelling ... Nobody could doubt Yanagihara’s ambition and, while there is still a slickness that can make her work feel superficial in places, To Paradise has greater artistic range and subtlety than its predecessor ... Book three is a plausible, terrifying vision of where we might be heading, which feels born more of genuine urgency than any desire to exploit the reader’s emotions. It should win over some of those who questioned its author’s motives in the past.
Amitava Kumar
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)Your reaction to Amitava Kumar’s discursive third novel may depend on the political situation in the country you live in ... Reading it in the UK, I felt both relief that Trump has been out of office for almost a year and dread at knowing that I still live under a government that stokes division. As ever, the context in which we read fiction is as important as that of its composition ... Kumar’s novel has little plot but it is tightly structured, with Satya’s days in Italy intercut with stories, essays and observations from his notebook, as well as his memories of growing up in India, where he worked as a journalist ... a novel that argues, by resisting both disinformation and the dogma of facts — and convinces me — that writing and reading fiction is the best way to make sense of our times.
Joshua Ferris
PositiveiNews (UK)It is to Ferris’s credit that he simultaneously explores these subjects and provides the kind of absorbing account of a life that used to suffice on its own in simpler times ... Ferris could write enthralling realist fiction in his sleep but it’s the ideas and formal ingenuity that really set this novel apart ... He captures the way some families exclude, as well as include, their members ... More than once I thought I had misunderstood a passage then reread it and realised Ferris had pulled off an about-turn ... He breaks the kind of rules that used to be prescribed in creative writing classes, introducing significant new characters late on, densely populating scenes and taking risks that could leave the reader feeling betrayed ... \'No two persons ever read the same book,\' said the American critic Edmund Wilson. Reactions to Ferris’s ultimately affecting novel may vary widely, but that feels apt ... By telling Charlie’s story, and depicting others’ conflicting perceptions of him, Ferris left me wondering whether two people ever know the same man.
Jonathan Franzen
RaveiNews (UK)Early on, we learn that Russ has suffered a \'humiliation,\' which involved a younger, more charismatic local pastor, but we don’t discover the details until later, so tension builds towards an excruciating reckoning ... A novel about a horny vicar, his depressed wife and some Nixon-era, corduroy-clad Christian teenagers sounds uncool. Yet it proves to be a page-by-page pleasure, a riveting way for Franzen to explore universal themes, tackled with ferocious creative intelligence ... he embeds us so deeply in his characters’ minds that we go through every scene with them ... Every scene is set with intricate details ... How thrilling to be reminded that the novel can absorb and reward us like no other narrative art form, and how moving to see a writer reach such staggering new heights.
Richard Powers
MixediNews (UK)Its Booker Prize shortlisting indicates that many will admire it. I couldn’t shake the sense that he was using this novel to draw attention to the climate crisis and, regardless of whether you sympathise, it doesn’t make for rewarding fiction. While the novel feels urgent, it is also didactic and self-conscious. Powers can still be an exhilarating prose stylist but there are passages of cosmic drivel, too ... the novel lacks the true take-it-or-leave-it eccentricity that set Powers’s early books apart.
Keith Ridgway
Positivei (UK)Ridgway’s use of close third-person narration to convey the protagonist’s thoughts, and hint at her repressed desire for another woman, makes for something timeless ... a polyphonic portrait of contemporary south London in overlapping stories, conjuring its glorious grind of possibility, pubs, politics, sex and rats ... Ridgway uses free indirect style to take us deep inside characters’ minds ... The pay-off isn’t always immediately apparent, but Ridgway’s artistry keeps you engaged ... Traditionalists may argue that A Shock isn’t a novel, but the line is increasingly blurred. Ideas and images echo through the chapters, with the protagonist of one reappearing at the edges of another, giving A Shock a novel’s thematic unity and formal patterning ... Or perhaps it’s none of these things. This is a novel that lends itself to interpretation—and is all the more profound and democratic for it.
Mieko Kawakami, tr. David Boyd and Sam Bett
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)... some of the most violent and disturbing scenes you’re likely to read this year ... It’s left to the reader to decide whether the bully’s indifference to his victim’s pain is a symptom of terrifying emotional numbness or whether it contains wisdom. Kawakami’s novel undermines our moral assumptions and leaves us unsure what to think about the way its characters behave ... [a] short but assured novel. By the end, the reader is so dizzily absorbed in its visceral details and philosophical complexity that, when the twist comes, it hits you with a strange and unexpected force.
Salman Rushdie
MixediNews (UK)What is the appeal of a collection of essays when its author’s views on many of its topics are already well known? In Rushdie’s case, it is the brio with which he expresses himself. But while Languages of Truth is an opportunity for Rushdie completists to find two decades’ worth of his pieces in one place, it lacks any sense of being a unified work ... the book still feels underedited, with too many forgettable inclusions—US college commencement speeches, for example—and repetitions ... Grandiose phrases recur throughout ... It is a shame, because there are the makings of a sharper, leaner collection. Some of the most powerful pieces concern Rushdie’s friends and heroes ... Writing about art forms other than literature brings Rushdie down from the lecture podium. He stops making generalisations and looks closely at individual works ... Here, Rushdie is astute and genially subjective, reminding us that his capacity for wonder has always been one of his best qualities and showing that he still has it.
Francis Spufford
PositiveiNews (UK)You may know people like Alec, Ben, Jo, Val and Vernon, but Spufford’s skilful way with character development makes them more than types. They are buffeted by history’s convulsions but they aren’t passive actors; they shape the world as much as it shapes them ... Spufford writes sensitively about ageing and the kind of big questions that are rarely articulated ... The way the characters grow is often surprising but never implausible ... there are some moments of jarring working-class dialogue and even racial stereotypes ... this novel is more successful when grounded in the everyday ... could be returned to years from now but, at the moment, it is undeniably moving to read a novel that celebrates the incalculable impact of every individual life.
Kazuo Ishiguro
MixediNews (UK)Ishiguro writes compassionately about teenagers, and their sense of being misunderstood dovetails with Klara’s loneliness. It is moving to see Klara almost forming bonds with people only to be reminded of her status as a robot and servant ... Political themes are more overt here than they have been before in Ishiguro ... Strangeness has always been one of the defining qualities of Ishiguro’s fiction but here it has become a mode that feels too cultivated to make Klara and the Sun truly unsettling. Klara can sound like an on-the-nose parody of an Ishiguro narrator ... succeeds as a distillation of its author’s long-standing interests, but it will fade in comparison to the uncanny power of the stories with which he made his mark.
William Boyd
RaveFinancial Times (UK)Boyd writes from a position of knowledge. His depictions of artists working in other forms have always been convincing ... The same is true of the characters in his new novel ... Boyd’s prose is as fluent as ever, but it’s the ideas pulsing beneath the surface of the story that distinguish Trio ... Trio is affecting as a subtle exploration of the relationship between individuals and history and as a depiction of characters who are searching for the things that make life worth living, whether they find them in film, literature or elsewhere.
Adam Mars-Jones
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)I found Colin’s voice affected, particularly in its repetitions ... The period observations would be better suited to a memoir ... There could be a broader social commentary here as 1975, the year Colin met Ray, was when Britons voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Economic Community. Later, Colin mentions Aids — a subject Mars-Jones explored in his short-story collection Monopolies of Loss— and the melancholic tone of these passages indicates that Colin’s story might be a metaphor for the losses gay men would endure ... Making such claims, however, I can hear myself trying to find meanings in Box Hill that aren’t necessarily there. It’s a clever and subtle novel but one that left me cold ... there is a stark cinematic quality to Box Hill. If the book were transferred to the screen, its strange atmosphere might be arresting, but on the page the material falls flat.
Linda Bostrom Knausgaard, Trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles
RaveThe Independent (UK)The emotional intensity created by Boström Knausgaard—who has previously published stories and a collection of poems—recalls Sylvia Plath, but her spare, accelerating modern myth owes something to the poet/classicist Anne Carson\'s novels in verse ... Some readers will be put off by the combination of lyricism and distress but I love the way Boström Knausgaard invests \'Dad\'— one of the key words of our lives—with fresh power. In Anna\'s mouth, this simple, multitudinous word reminds me of Flaubert ... there\'s levity ... Nevertheless, the violence—of language, blood, mania – assaults the reader as Anna plumbs the depths of a condition which sounds similar to bipolar disorder. This novella cannot be read quickly, its psychological range and febrile prose demand attentiveness. It takes skill and imagination to describe extreme emotions in ways to which everybody can relate but that\'s what Boström Knausgaard achieves in this short, piercing book.
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)\"The pair filled their letters with literary references and Hamilton traces every allusion. The same commitment was palpable when Hamilton co-edited Words In Air (2008) — four decades’ worth of letters between Lowell and the poet Elizabeth Bishop, which I didn’t so much read as feel I was living in for 800 pages, so rich was it in artistic insight and social history. ... Reading their letters today, I feel some of the awe Hardwick expressed when the philosopher Hannah Arendt was ill in 1974: \'That whole generation and its learning, the kind of thinking it did, the greatness of the lives and the persons.\'
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Benjamin Markovits
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)The drama ratchets up as the Essinger siblings arrive at their family home in Austin, Texas, for a seasonal gathering. As the novel continues, \'the presence of accumulated life\', as one character puts it, proves utterly absorbing ... A Weekend in New York explored multiple characters’ perspectives but it was ultimately Paul’s novel, in part because the reader rooted for him on the court. Its sequel is a broader family portrait ...
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Bela Shayevich
RaveThe Independent (UK)[Alexievich] ... interviews ordinary citizens and shapes their testimonies into coherent narratives. The result is an extraordinary work of non-fiction which is composed of the types of stories that usually go untold amid the march of time and change ... It’s no surprise to find alcoholism, brutality and suicide featuring prominently in accounts of the former-Soviet Union. But this book communicates more clearly than anything I’ve encountered before the bewilderment Russians feel at their country’s chaotic transition from socialism to capitalism ... I struggle to find much light amid the darkness of these 700 pages. The courage involved in the collaborations between Alexievich and her interviewees is itself a source of hope but many of their stories are relentlessly disturbing. Perhaps you’ll find more reasons to feel optimistic than I do but, regardless, you should read Second-Hand Time. The narratives Alexievich has sculpted take place in landlocked settings and yet, in Bela Shayevich’s English translation, they come at the reader in thunderous waves, churned from oceans of history. This book – important without sounding self-important – is heart-breaking and impossible to put down.
Gretchen McCulloch
PositiveThe Financial Times\"[McCulloch\'s] tone is endearingly nerdy, her accessible ideas the fruit of her academic research and experience of writing the Resident Linguist column for Wired magazine ... helpful if you find yourself baffled by emoji in messages from younger relatives, or have to google acronyms or often deliberate over how to begin an email ... Can internet language be truly \'revolutionary\' if it is forged on platforms that are owned by tech companies which, like 18th-century authors of dictionaries, have their own agendas? McCulloch ignores such questions and, at times, there is something coercive about her headlong embrace of the new: if you aren’t, say, one of the \'two million people [who] use emoji every single hour\', you’ll be left behind ... These reservations aside, McCulloch offers a compelling snapshot of a world in flux, from which readers will learn a lot about language, the internet and themselves.
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Aleksandar Hemon
RaveThe Independent... wrenching but often very funny and self-deprecating too ... loving, humorous accounts of family, friends and pets have the potential to expand our compassion towards the strangers who live among us ... Hemon is interested in the ways that we use narrative and language to negotiate trauma ... extraordinary.
Emma Glass
RaveFinancial TimesThe staccato prose, repetition and alliteration here typify Glass’s writing style; the effect is propulsive and absorbing, the violent scenes and visceral details discomfiting. Glass tries to narrow the gap as much as possible between what her narrator feels and what the reader feels. Peach is only 98 pages long but, on finishing it, you won’t feel short-changed and you wouldn’t want it to be any longer—it is an intensely physical reading experience ... Glass’s publisher calls her writing \'lyrical\' but it isn’t flowery and she rarely wastes words. Everything about Peach is clipped: the title, jabbing sentences, spare use of commas, characters’ names, unspecified setting. Glass is careful not to overburden her prose with imagery and, when she does deliver a striking image, it is all the more impactful for that ... The narrative is tightly controlled ... As a novel about an assault against a woman, Peach feels both timely and timeless.
Dave Eggers
PositiveIndependent\"Dave Eggers\' new novel hits you with prose as stark and as luminous as its Saudi Arabian setting ... while his seventh book exhibits his versatility again, it should confirm Eggers\' position among America\'s leading contemporary writers.\
David Means
PositiveThe Financial Times... [Means\'s] long sentences and abrupt shifts in setting can be confusing ... it’s still possible to get lost in multi-clause sentences (one clocks in at 549 words). His maximalist prose style, however, has greater impact within the confines of the short form ... uses collapsing timeframes and figures from American mythology — FBI agents, gangsters, Depression-era Okies — to populate an imaginative world rooted in the familiar, while offering an alternative vision of America’s present and its past ... a short collection but it contains a considerable amount of life ... no matter what his characters suffer, Means believes in the power of stories to rescue and redeem people.
Lucia Berlin
MixedFinancial Times\"Only true Berliners will be interested in Welcome Home, a brief but disjointed collection of unfinished memoir, photographs and letters — and they may feel it does a disservice to its author. It starts brilliantly with Berlin writing about her childhood... But the memoir is palpably a draft, and there’s something deflating about encountering people and events easily recognisable from the stories. More insightful are the letters charting Berlin’s early attempts at writing.\
Lucia Berlin
PositiveFinancial Times\"... why weren’t these 22 stories selected for [A Manual for Cleaning Women]? The answer, equally inevitably, is that they’re not as strong. There’s nothing here as harrowing, for example, as \'Unmanageable\' ... or as piercingly humane as the earlier book’s title story. Yet, all the same, there’s still plenty in Evening in Paradise to conjure the original thrill of reading Berlin.\
Keith Gessen
RaveThe Financial TimesAt times, A Terrible Country reads like non-fiction, especially when it veers into polemic ... Andrei’s views on Putin’s Russia are refreshing and accessible, as they’re articulated in Gessen’s precise, unornamented prose, but it’s the details about his Russian characters’ lives that really stick in the mind ... A Terrible Country tells the reader a lot about contemporary Russia and, importantly, lifts the lid on domestic political resistance to Putin. But what makes this a moving and thought-provoking novel is Andrei’s personal struggle to find his way in the world, his sense of obligation to his family and his realization that his parents’ emigration—the very thing that has afforded him opportunities—was \'the great tragedy of my grandmother’s life.\'
Emma Glass
RaveThe Financial TimesThe staccato prose, repetition and alliteration here typify Glass’s writing style; the effect is propulsive and absorbing, the violent scenes and visceral details discomfiting. Glass tries to narrow the gap as much as possible between what her narrator feels and what the reader feels. Peach is only 98 pages long but, on finishing it, you won’t feel short-changed and you wouldn’t want it to be any longer — it is an intensely physical reading experience ... Everything about Peach is clipped: the title, jabbing sentences, spare use of commas, characters’ names, unspecified setting. Glass is careful not to overburden her prose with imagery and, when she does deliver a striking image, it is all the more impactful for that ... As a novel about an assault against a woman, Peach feels both timely and timeless. It challenges the reader to examine their responses to the narrator.
Luke Kennard
PositiveThe Financial TimesThis dystopian Britain of the near future sounds only slightly worse than the one we know ... Kennard, 35, is the author of five poetry collections. His poems can be hilarious but they subtly express moral concerns too; in The Transition, he reins in his absurdist instincts and makes explicit Karl’s decency ... The reader roots for this flawed but sympathetic figure, as he tries to uncover the truth about The Transition and save Genevieve ... The Transition has similarities with Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954): both are first novels, written in times of austerity; both feature underachieving male protagonists in unnamed provincial cities; both authors channel their anger into comedy and gripping plots. Occasionally, Kennard’s characters sound like they’re expressing his own views and the novel risks becoming didactic.
Joshua Cohen
PositiveThe Financial TimesAs a stylist, Cohen can be thrilling to read but his long multi-clause sentences occasionally get knotty and require patient unravelling. The prose of Moving Kings is generally leaner than elsewhere in his oeuvre and alive to everyday details ... At 240 pages, Moving Kings is considerably shorter than Cohen’s previous two novels but it’s sharper and feels important and timely for the way it dramatises life at the harsh end of western societies where housing is regarded as a commodity rather than a right. This is a deeply political novel that helps us to imagine a world where the real kings and queens will not be the property racketeers, but instead those who attain a freedom that has nothing to do with what they own.
