RaveThe Guardian (UK)Mather is clear on the limits of our knowledge and the extent to which the inner workings of our planet – which volcanoes provide a window on to – remain a matter of speculation ... Detailed, impeccably researched.
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Vivid ... Grush paints a compelling picture of the rigours faced by these driven and accomplished women ... An important record of their achievements so far.
Tara Isabella Burton
RaveThe Guardian (UK)[A] fun, insightful romp ... This witty, sceptical book is the thought-provoking story of how we got here.
Raja Shehadeh
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A powerful rebuttal of the current attempt to sever today’s situation in Palestine from its roots ... His new memoir distils these sprawling themes into a personal and political struggle for justice. It’s a mark of Shehadeh’s brilliance that this latest revisiting is full of surprises: it’s even in tone, but jet-fuelled by implicit emotion; there’s no conventional suspense, but it is absolutely gripping ... Shehadeh’s writing is clear and pared-back; it wears its power lightly. But his masterly, remorseless selection and accumulation of detail builds an unanswerable case against Palestine’s historic and current oppressors. It also, finally, re-establishes the relationship that is the memoir’s emotional centre of gravity.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... veering from fine-grained arguments over a new constitution to visceral reports of the violence the state was still inflicting on those who defied it ... This mosaic of texts builds a picture of both the principles of resistance and democracy-building and the ugly, absurd, frightening, occasionally joyful experience of living by them in a stubbornly unreformed dictatorship. It’s also a reckoning with the legacy of his much-loved father, the human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif el-Islam, who was imprisoned and tortured under Anwar Sadat and Mubarak ... There are no easy solutions here, but You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a heartbreaking, hopeful answer.
Joshua Ferris
RaveThe GuardianFerris's 'we' is a fractious, hydra-headed array of copywriters and art directors, from upbeat networker Karen Woo to grizzled, reclusive Frank Brizzolera. Their days of extravagant anomie are shaped by a patchwork of kitchen gossip, emails and snippets that filter down from the office of their forbidding boss … Ferris is brilliant on the pathos of the 'useless shit' that surrounds his workers. In an attenuated world of modular desks and coffee stations, 'our mugs, our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers' take on a life of their own, alternately hoarded and despised as reminders of hundreds of lost days … Then We Came to the End is preoccupied by the treacherous non-durability of consumer durables. Beyond the revolving security doors lies grander-scale private suffering. But the novel reserves its greatest compassion for the disregarded sadnesses of the office.
G. Willow Wilson
RaveThe GuardianThe terrible risks run by Alif the Unseen's online activists are no magical-realist device, and just as in the real-life Arab spring, the internet brings together a coalition of unlikely allies to face them. He is helped by the ferocious djinn, an elderly imam and a renegade Gulf prince, but Alif's two most steadfast companions are women: Dina, his pious, niqab-wearing Egyptian neighbour, and a young American woman named only ‘the convert’. Like Alif – a ‘mongrel’ born to an absent Arab father and a formerly Hindu mother – they don't fit easily into the hierarchical, lineage-obsessed society of The City: Alif the Unseen is consistently sympathetic to those caught between two (or more) worlds.
