RaveThe New York Times Book Review... lays bare women’s intimate, lacerating experience of war and its consequent trauma... In Sam Taylor’s seamless, poetic translation, Slimani masterfully captures these nuanced shifts: the French that scales back to Mathilde’s Alsatian dialect when she’s in the throes of delirious illness ... Slimani writes motherhood like no one else, and Mathilde’s subtle ambivalence toward that role is no exception ... Slimani handles Mathilde’s evolution elegantly: The wife is no victim.
Amitava Kumar
RaveThe GuardianIn telling the story of an immigrant trying to grapple with American campus life, Amitava Kumar has written a bold and provocative counter-narrative: an insider novel that takes occasional pride in its opacity, winking across the room at lit-crit students, developing world feminists and pre-millennial Indians. Where name-dropping by the elite would be evidence of snobbery, from an immigrant student it captures a ritual of self-definition and self-fashioning ... Kumar writes with disarming honesty of the sexual life of a typical south Asian man ... the book is replete with footnotes, artwork and photographs, lines of Urdu poetry and clippings from news magazines. Polyphonic and digressive, it is more an essay novel than an autofiction. Kumar daringly mirrors historical similarities across continents, and situates personal stories against the backdrop of pop-cultural references ... this novel fearlessly unmasks some great men, making political stalwarts and revolutionaries stumble down from their pedestals.
Anuradha Roy
RaveThe GuardianRoy’s chiselled prose allows her to expose the endless, treacherous hypocrisies of Indian society ... India is evoked in the ginger and crushed cloves of a seaside tea-stall, the poetry of Jibanananda Das, the scent of grapefruit and above all, in the shame of speaking about sexual violence ... In tackling these issues, Roy has used the most potent weapon in a writer’s arsenal – the form of the novel, with its ability to simultaneously be universal and particular – to boldly unmask the hidden face of Indian spirituality and the rampant sexual abuse in its unholy confines.
