RaveThe New York Times Book Review...caught something far deeper than the financial fallout and collateral damage other journalists were covering ...in Ghosts of the Tsunami, Lloyd Parry has opened out his celebrated essay to offer an eerie, brushstroked evocation of a whole realm of remote villages struggling to find order in a world of absences ...less a continuous narrative than a collection of shards. Torn pictures from a family photo album, as they seem, his individual stories form a fractured portrait of a country we’re more accustomed to seeing as a polished whole ...strikingly vivid, even visceral writer, Lloyd Parry sweeps away distractions...to offer tightly focused and consuming human stories ...it’s in the realm of the ineffable that Lloyd Parry’s elliptical vignettes come to strongest life ...in the tsunami he has found a horrifying metaphor for those subliminal forces that swirl underneath the manicured surfaces of Japan.
David Mitchell
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewFrom the first sentences of The Bone Clocks, you know you’re in David Mitchell Land. Fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes, ill-treated by a boyfriend and furious with her mother, runs away from home in 1984. We hear the ‘dozy-cow voice’ of a woman she encounters. We watch sea gulls ‘scrawking for chips.’ We see how ‘the wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjurer’s pocket.’ As ever, Mitchell writes a crunchily grounded, bitingly Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D. H. Lawrence were reborn for the digital age … Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love...Other writers may be more moving, and some may push deeper, but very few excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does.
