PositiveiNews (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.
Isabel Allende
Mixedi (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
Positivei (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
PositiveiNews (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.
