About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Moon Unit Zappa
Rave The Guardian (UK) For such a thoroughly dispiriting saga, Earth to Moon is somehow an unconscionably entertaining read. This is in no small part thanks to the prose ... She emerges to claim her own narrative at last. And what a narrative it is.
Kevin Barry
Rave iNews (UK) \"The Heart in Winter is both a romance and a travelogue. It is filled with lust and knife fights and people of a contemplative bearing whose existential concerns can be intimated in the little \'V\' that forms between their eyebrows. In other words, life is hard in America in 1891, and pity the fool who dares to hope otherwise. Barry brings all this to the page in a sensory overload of language and imagery, and with boundless impish glee. What a writer he is.\
Salman Rushdie
Rave iNews (UK) \"Knife is essentially reportage, with Rushdie recounting the event, the agonizing physical and emotional fallout, and then reliving it ... Rushdie has never written quite as directly as this, or emotionally. He emerges as stoic, droll, and astonishingly brave. \'There are moments when these events are painful to set down,\' he says. They’re painful to read, too, but necessary. As simple testimony, it makes for an incredibly compelling reading experience. The aim of the attack was ultimately to silence him. The aim failed. Salman Rushdie is a writer. The pen proved mightier than the sword after all.\
Rory Stewart
Rave iNews Ggenuinely eye-opening stuff, always riveting, often horrifying ... This is one of the most captivating political books in recent memory.
William Boyd
Positive iNews (UK) Does not, it must be said, pack the same emotional punch as some of Boyd’s earlier work, but then this essentially is a ripping yarn. And as such, it is pretty much faultless: as moreish as good chocolate, terrifically entertaining, and deeply humane.
Paul Murray
Rave iNews (UK) Furthers his reputation as a writer of tragicomedy without peer ... Their stories are relayed over successive chapters, often in exquisite detail, and brought to vivid life, each with their own distinctive cadence, along with an amalgam of attendant eccentricities and gripes ... Both brilliant entertainment and a penetrating look at the human condition, as heavy with pathos as it is rich with humour. And if 650 pages asks a lot of the reader, in this case it more than delivers.
Mat Osman
Rave The Observer (UK) This is a book that wallows in the dirt, disease and heavy period detail of its era ... It is within the teeming capital’s environs that his two characters are thrust towards a dramatic conclusion in prose pinpricked with ultra-vivid imagery.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Rave iNews (UK) \"Stephen is delicate, very delicate, and at times Small Worlds feels like the most sensitive book ever written, because no matter how serious its themes – race riots, a parent’s depression – Azumah Nelson deals with it with profound tenderness ... Given that even the most rudimentary of Peckham sunsets is described here as if it were a sonata deserving of trumpets...it’s all emphatically overwritten – and riven, too, with tears, most of them Stephen’s...but the overall effect is mesmerizing, at times even overwhelming, and succeeds in making the reader similarly alert to the everyday beauty that exists within even the most hostile of environments ... Nelson stares into the abyss, and manages to find jewels.\
Colson Whitehead
Positive iNews (UK) \"In the hands of a lesser author, this might have been cause for concern, but in Whitehead’s, it becomes that rarest of things: a follow-up that pretty much earns its stripes ... Whitehead excels at stitching gallows humor into some very heavy topics, and this novel is riven with them ... If, ultimately, Crook Manifesto doesn’t quite impress like its predecessor, then, well, that’s sequels for you. There are times here when the action seems a little too caper-ish, like a cartoon mugging for laughs. But Whitehead, a stylist whose sentences sing, mostly maintains the momentum – which is just as well, because a third installment, this one set in the 80s, looms.\
Charles Frazier
Mixed The Observer (UK) Frazier has written a pretty OK book where, once, years ago now, he wrote a great one.
Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
Mixed iNews (UK) A fundamentally odd thing ... If it’s true to say that this is a book strictly for fans, then it’s worth pointing out that Murakami has legions of them around the world. He emerges from these pages as affable, certainly, but also as curiously blank, and you wonder why he bothered with this at all when each muted revelation seemingly cost him so much to make.
Barbara Kingsolver
Rave iNews (UK) Not...particularly easy...to read, either. Other novels that feature abject poverty and misery can sometimes transcend into beauty...but Demon Copperfield remains astonishingly bleak, misfortune piled on top of disappointment, then drugs, tragedy and death ... Yet, the granularity of its detail makes you feel like you are living alongside Demon for every minute of his blighted life, and Kingsolver never puts a foot wrong. It all comes across as entirely authentic, the work of a writer wholly appalled by what she sees, but who herself will not flinch from its ugly reality, or its human cost, not even for a moment.
Daisy LaFarge
Positive iNews (UK) Arresting ... Whatever is the opposite of a beach read, Paul is it ... The atmosphere becomes steadily worse, and Lafarge ratchets up the discomfort until it is nigh-on unbearable. When Frances does at last find her voice, the reader is gulping for air right alongside her ... There are echoes of Rachel Cusk throughout: Lafarge is entirely in control of her material, and unafraid to go dark. It is uneasy reading, but it is visceral, too, a white-knuckle ride not because of any attendant thrills and spills but because the tension is perpetually on the brink of boiling, and then boiling over.
Louise Welsh
Positive iNews (UK) Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut...doesn’t read as a rehash so much as a welcome return to familiar, and clearly fertile, ground ... So squalid in places you half-expect the pages themselves to squelch, there nevertheless remains a winningly sardonic tone throughout ... If The Second Cut races a little too tidily to its conclusion, it nevertheless remains eminently entertaining – no mean feat given that this is a story peopled by misanthropes and misery, and by folk who have no reason for hope but remain hopeful nevertheless. There is always more profit to pursue, more parks after dark, more whisky to wallow in.
Hernan Diaz
Rave iNews (UK) Diaz...writes exquisitely about the luminous unhappiness that money and power ultimately bring, and how they can diminish lives ... It thoroughly deserves its Booker nod: it is a clever, literary kaleidoscope that constantly challenges the realities it puts forward, requiring you to step back, and look again. You may have to read it more than once.
Isabel Allende
Mixed i (UK) Violeta routinely contradicts herself ... The book only properly comes alive in the mid-70s, when the ravages of dictatorship has a great effect on Violeta’s family, and suddenly there is narrative urgency, Allende electing at last to show rather than tell, allowing the reader to fully engage ... Violeta, a comparatively slim novel and briskly told, feels like a missed opportunity. It skims stones over so much, and before you know it, it’s the 50s, the 80s; she is 30 years old, then 90. Allende, though, is terrific on old age, and shows how adventure doesn’t have to stop once you start stooping. If ultimately you marvel at her heroine’s pluck and fortitude, her ongoing lust for life, it is because you likely feel much the same way about Allende herself. She may have written better books, but Violeta engages all the same.
Richard Osman
Positive i (UK) The Man Who Died Twice...is at once a sequel but also ostensibly the same book, boasting most of the same characters, and many of the same jokes ... Osman, confident in his abilities now, gleefully throws everything into the mix ... It seems superfluous to point out that much here is frivolous and a little ridiculous, because Osman was never after credulity so much as escapist fun in the first place. Only a curmudgeon would deny that The Man Who Died Twice is just that: jolly and silly – in fact, jolly silly – but it’s not quite all caper ... His elderly characters are increasingly three-dimensional, not two, and he doesn’t flinch from their frailties ... It is these scenes that give the book, which is sometimes a little too knockabout, an emotional heft, something you hope Osman might build on if, as seems inevitable, the Thursday Murder Club returns again and again.
William Boyd
Positive iNews (UK) At first sight, Trio seems conspicuously underwhelming ... Boyd is very much in domestic mode here ... the whole thing purrs along with such effortlessness that you are barely aware of the engine working underneath ... There is much attention to period detail, a lovely portrait of the 60s British film world, and Boyd’s characters live, breathe and bruise vividly. All of this makes for a novel as charming as it is satisfying, a pleasure to read.