RaveThe Financial Times... the background [Walter] creates manages to convey the romance and adventure of a Western — and of those cherished family tales ... Walter is mining the same seam as Fitzgerald in his examination of the gulf between rich and poor ... Walter has given himself an ambitious task, not least in knitting together an origin story for his city from fragments and inventions. But the most joyful storytelling hits you in the form of first person accounts that are inserted into the main narrative ... With its rebellion against inequality and debates about capitalism, there are clear echoes from 1909 to the US today. Incitement to riot, dreadfully topical since the assault on the Capitol last month, also gets a look in. But The Cold Millions offers more: a study of individuals living, willingly or unwillingly, through tumult.
Emily St. John Mandel
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)...a novel that jumps back and forth through time and place, with a fracturing narrative and a constant sense of deliberate disorientation. Extraneous characters with strange connections to each other multiply, and there are too many apparitions. The shards of storytelling splinter. This is by design, but it adds up to less of a coherent whole than Station Eleven, where Mandel pulls off similar tricks to great effect ... The hours before the whole edifice of ludicrously high returns comes crashing down, the arrests, court case and fallout as the staff who were complicit face disgrace — it’s all masterfully done. And the conman Alkaitis in jail is an interesting study of corrupted memory ... It’s chilling stuff.
James Brook-Smith
PositiveThe Financial Times...[an] entertaining and rather racy history of subversiveness ... The details are glorious and told with relish; this book dwells on the \'privations and idiosyncrasies\' of public schools as stimulants to rebellion through the ages.
