PositiveThe Financial TimesJulia Blackburn—who lives on the Suffolk coast—is an ideal guide to such territory, her oblique, allusive paragraphs leavening pure pedagogy with memoir and the often startling richness of her own imagination ... Suffice to say, Time Song is not a straightforward book about Doggerland. It is much more interesting than that ... A book like this could easily be dry and academic, or if not, very heavy on the singular first person pronoun. But Time Song is richly peopled, Blackburn’s unflagging curiosity and sharp eye bringing a diverse cast of characters vividly to life. She sifts their stories not just for information, but for meaning; she’s conjuring for us not merely the facts of Doggerland, but the weight of its omission from our history books, our collective memory and our imaginations.
Ocean Vuong
MixedThe Financial Times... it’s possible that the faults that mar On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for me will be outshone, for others, by the clarity and honesty of its vision, its powerful emotional payload and vivid imagery ... Some parts read like essays and may have started out like that...This material, written in a different register from the lyrical, dreamlike voice of the rest of the novel, doesn’t feel evenly woven into the story ... frequent changes of tone and an inconsistent point of view run the risk of destabilising readers unless handled with great control ... As a poet, Vuong is a prodigious talent, his handling of words and images both brutal and delicate, his treatment of violence, sex and the body radically clear-eyed. In a novel, though, metaphors don’t always detonate in the same way that they do in the confined space of a poem, especially if they are devalued by being too frequent or thrown out casually, their meaning not fully mined ... My friend who loved it said that she had to read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in small doses. I did too, but out of a sense of frustration that a valuable testament from such a promising writer should be so hard to read. It’s possible that the novel simply isn’t Vuong’s form; it’s also possible that given more time, and further drafts, this book could have been brought to perfection. Either way, it will be fascinating to see what this extraordinarily gifted writer does next.
Frances Liardet
RaveThe GuardianThe writing is often dazzling...and this...lifts what might have been a sentimental story into different territory altogether ... as well as being a deft social history, it is a love story ... This is a book suffused with parental affection: fierce, physical and almost inexpressibly tender. Liardet describes beautifully the almost animal quality of that feeling, called up by the smell of a child’s neck, the curve of a chubby arm, even an outgrown dress. She’s also good on the changes time wreaks in childhood, both on the child, who alters from one month to the next, and on the parent ... Liardet is a masterful observer of the telling minutiae of life ... It’s rare to find a novel in which everyday items are so carefully and luminously rendered, and the effect is powerful ... the 30s and 40s are brilliantly evoked, as is the present century, but the period in between feels temporally unclear. Also a little unevenly handled is the movement of the characters through time ... Nevertheless, as a testament to parental love and its relationship to the heartbreaking, healing, almost ungraspable passage of time, We Must Be Brave is a great success: richly observed, lovingly drawn and determinedly clear-eyed to the last.
Robert MacFarlane
PositiveFinancial Times\"... as teeming and complex as an ecosystem ... Again and again, what [Macfarlane] identifies is years of utterly focused looking distilled into rarefied and highly charged prose. Yet there is plenty of texture here, created by the variety of relationships Macfarlane has with his subjects ...
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Elegant and scholarly, but never po-faced, Landmarks is both a bid to save our rich haul of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep, creative relationship to place...\
Walter Kempowski, Trans. by Charlotte Collins
MixedThe Guardian\"Homeland, interestingly, is not such a smooth read. Throughout, there is an instability around free indirect speech, and there are some unattributed lines of spoken dialogue, too. The result is a slightly distancing sense of uncertainty about who is telling the story and how we should relate to it – which may have been deliberate on Kempowski’s part ... Homeland walks a tightrope between black humour and horror...\
Chris Power
PositiveThe GuardianResist[s] superficial analysis in a way that is interesting in itself. Power is an extraordinarily unshowy craftsman, so that discussing the writing itself feels like trying to focus on the glass of a window, rather than the view beyond. This is partly a function of the transparency of the prose, which so lacks ornament as to almost feel bald in places, and partly to do with the disposition of his narrators, all of whom share a kind of emotional reserve that is close to affectlessness ... So much is left unsaid that the result is a deliberately frustrating gap in interpretation ... internationalist in outlook...This gives the collection a flavour that might have been less noticeable five years ago, but in today’s political climate feels eloquent ... a uniquely unsettling and subtle debut collection; one wonders if a longer work might also be on the cards.
Brian Carter
RaveThe GuardianIt is...quite mystical...some passages are steeped in the kind of fuzzy, pantheistic spirituality that would usually make me wince ... And yet it rises effortlessly above these potential hazards; the quality of the writing and the depth and clarity of Carter’s imagination turning it into something almost inexpressibly beautiful. His vision of Dartmoor as a complex living ecosystem is extraordinary; he seems to be able to hold everything in his mind at once ... His prose slips subtly from lyrical description to earthy humor, its rhythms sunk deep into my DNA as something to aim for, if never achieve.
Samantha Harvey
RaveFinancial TimesWhile Samantha Harvey’s fourth novel is on the surface a medieval whodunnit, it is also a fine character study, and a brilliantly convincing evocation of both time and place ... the experience her book engenders is less like reading a novel and more akin to time travel ... There is great pleasure to be had in those vertiginous moments when authentic, banal reality...seems briefly to make itself known to the imagination, and The Western Wind is almost uniquely satisfying in this regard ... I was left with unanswered questions, and a nagging sense of doubt...And yet the book’s flaws are far outweighed by the luminosity of the writing and the masterly evocation of a world so utterly different from the one we live in.
Philip Pullman
RaveThe Financial TImesTo fans of Philip Pullman, lovers of literature and writers of all stripes, it’s a gold mine. Many books about writing take an elevated tone, bandying about obscure terms from literary theory, or treating the process of inspiration as a holy mystery. Pullman puts on no airs and graces. He seems not to feel the need, as many do, to cloak the job in smoke and mirrors; instead, he is funny, honest and very down to earth ... Pullman is also refreshingly open about the business side of being a writer ... There’s so much richness to be found in this collection: essays on Dickens, Blake and Paradise Lost; explorations of both science and religion; powerful asides on the damage done to children’s imaginations by the national curriculum (Pullman was a teacher for many years); pieces on the moral power of fiction and on the different kind of storytelling found in theater and film. Humane, wise and immensely readable, Daemon Voices is a fascinating tour of Pullman’s teeming imagination and an inestimable illumination of the writing life.
Caitlin Moran
MixedThe Financial TimesMoran has always been a gloriously acute and funny writer, and the combination of memoir and make-believe here gives her plenty of scope to exercise her considerable ability to entertain. Her descriptions of the music and media worlds of 1990s London are brilliantly recognisable, and Suzanne Banks, the chaotic and charismatic lead singer of feminist girl band The Branks, leaps off the page—she’s a fantastic creation. Naturally, the book is peppered with jokes, Moran’s trademark wordplay and some snappy one-liners ... But there are problems. Would an impoverished teenage music journalist in 1994 really have owned a laptop, but not a Walkman? ... there is the issue of the book’s tense, which slides around unpredictably ... Such a slip may be surprising from such an experienced writer, but it’s the result of an instability at the very heart of ... this funny, warm, insightful but ultimately half-formed book.
Jesse Ball
RaveThe Financial TimesWith such strange brushstrokes as to render the story almost a parable, American novelist Jesse Ball creates something uniquely memorable and utterly profound ... The work that Ball asks the reader to undertake in filling in the missing information is the wellspring of the book’s transformative power. For having created the boy with Down syndrome yourself — having brought him into being, imaginatively — it does not feel possible to return to a previous state of ignorance, or lack of sympathy, or avoidance.
Jesse Ball
RaveThe Financial TimesWith such strange brushstrokes as to render the story almost a parable, American novelist Jesse Ball creates something uniquely memorable and utterly profound ... The work that Ball asks the reader to undertake in filling in the missing information is the wellspring of the book’s transformative power. For having created the boy with Down syndrome yourself — having brought him into being, imaginatively — it does not feel possible to return to a previous state of ignorance, or lack of sympathy, or avoidance ... The strange subjects of clowning and cormorants become ways of asking what it might be like to move through the world in a different, less intellectualised but no less meaningful way.
Tara Westover
PositiveThe Financial Times\"The diaries lend Educated a forensic level of detail, so it stands out when information is withheld. Perhaps this is prurient, but given that Westover describes so honestly the shame she’s made to feel in relation to her body and her sexuality at the hands of both her brother and fundamentalist religion, I wanted to hear more about her journey out of \'modesty\' and towards the healthy relationship hinted at towards the end of the book ... In the end, Westover’s triumph in forging a grounded self, and a coherent narrative, from such a maelstrom, come to the same thing: for it is in the often complex and sometimes long-delayed act of assembling the story of our lives that we discover who we really are.\
Amy Bloom
RaveFinancial Times“It is these letters, along with Hick’s journalism and other historical documents that American novelist Amy Bloom draws on to paint an imagined portrait of the relationship between the two women, a short novel both breathtakingly intimate and with the grandest of historical sweeps … The letters, and the conversations between the two women, allow Bloom to range back and forth in time, drawing a vivid and vividly satisfying picture of life at the White House … Hick’s wry, perceptive narratorial voice is conjured brilliantly; she is both hard-bitten hack and hopeless romantic. Bloom has a keen ear for dialogue … If White Houses isn’t an example of the great American novel then frankly, I don’t know what is.”
Jessie Burton
MixedThe Financial TimesThere is much to enjoy in the successive revelations of the plot, as well as a good sense of a city so familiar now as a friendly, laid-back European destination but then at the heart of a vast trading empire. The richly drawn interiors are nicely claustrophobic, while the flavours and smells of the food are both seductive and sickening. Burton is good at atmospheres, too, and much of the book is imbued with a sense of indefinable threat … The Miniaturist is not perfect, however. Key scenes waver out of Burton’s control, leaving the reader unclear about what has happened and why; the flow of time is uneven, and some characters’ motivations (including that of the miniaturist) are unclear. A general sense of imprecision runs through the book, from plot right down to the level of metaphor and language.
Sarah Hall
RaveThe Financial TimesHall writes brilliantly about women, particularly women as they are observed and imagined by men, and when she adopts the male gaze for her narrators and characters it is both virtuoso and troubling ... All Hall’s short stories have at their heart an interest in base instinct rather than social convention, physical reaction rather than rational thought; and the intensity with which she explores the transgression of psychological, geographical and corporeal boundaries lends her work a darkly sensuous precariousness that’s uniquely challenging and compelling. Madame Zero may not be for milquetoasts, but it’s all the richer for it.
Keggie Carew
RaveThe Financial TimesDadland is part family memoir, part history book, and is compelling and moving from start to finish ... She brings the wartime sections to life by drawing on a remarkable facility for description ... There’s a risk, in a book that aims for a general readership, that the historical sections will weigh the narrative down, but Carew leavens them with flashbacks to her unusual childhood, research into her complex family history and incidents — often comic, sometimes heartbreakingly poignant — from her father’s later life ... [a] funny, fascinating and unflinching tribute.
Elizabeth Strout
RaveThe Financial TimesThe stories of the people of Amgash and beyond relate to one another sometimes closely, sometimes obliquely; there are glimpses of other people that feel exactly like the glimpses one has of those with whom our own lives intersect … It is an extraordinary — almost miraculous — exercise in imaginative empathy, unsentimental and unflinching, yet full of respect for the moments in friendships and relationships that remain mysterious and half-understood … [Strout’s] writing is supple, subtle and almost completely transparent, eschewing showiness of any kind and instead relying on a mastery of free indirect speech so complete as to create a perfect illusion of eavesdropping on others’ thoughts and feelings at the very moment they are having them.
Sara Baume
RaveThe Financial TimesAt the beginning of their careers, writers are often told 'write what you know,' but it is Baume’s second novel and not her first that does this, its imaginative scope less ambitious, its subject matter far closer to home than that of her previous work ... If you eschew conventional plot and its attendant devices, all that’s left to retain your readers’ attention is the pleasure they take in your prose. Baume’s writing is near-faultless: instinctively balanced, precise and often surprising ... A Line Made By Walking is an insightful exploration of the psychological processes and potential emotional toll of a life whose goal is to turn experience into art — or books. The acuity of Baume’s observations and the exacting lyricism of her writing are just as strong as in her debut.
Elena Passarello
PositiveThe Financial Times...playful, shrewd and illuminating … Passarello is at her best when subtly dissecting modern cultural mores and attitudes to animals rather than working to recreate the thought-worlds of the past. In consequence, the second half is where the real treasure lies … These essays dance along the margins of what is humanly possible when it comes to understanding other forms of life. Our relationship with animals takes in whimsy and monstering; selfless love and vile cruelty; anthropomorphism, projection and pragmatic, profitable utility. It describes far better our own nature than it illuminates theirs.
Richard Fortey
PositiveThe Financial TimesHis style on the page mirrors that on the small screen: deeply knowledgeable, enthusiastic, avuncular and a little bit old-fashioned ... he exists in the book largely as an observant and curious eye, his interest always outward. Objectivity, rather than subjectivity, is his goal — although whether that is possible is another matter ... it’s strange that the picture of Grim’s Dyke Wood that emerges from Fortey’s fascinating and thorough book is not as pin-sharp as it might have been, the sense of it as a real place somehow just out of reach. Fortey illuminates its flora and fauna, history and geology with indisputable expertise; but perhaps, in focusing so closely on the trees and their inhabitants, the lay reader is denied a clear enough view of the wood.
