RaveBook OxygenAs a one-time journalist in Delhi, Deepa Anappara knows of what she writes, and her prose, richly punctuated by local idiom, is exceptionally vivid. She evokes the variety, individuality and vitality of the characters in Jai’s community with skill and humour, whilst underlining the appalling conditions in which they live ... Jai’s perspective is bold, brave, funny, touching and multi-faceted...his voice transforms some pretty grim material into something life-affirming ... This is the kind of fiction that beguiles whilst packing a huge political punch. Even aged nine, Jai is aware of the casual injustices of his world, how the police value the lives of hi-fi dwellers more than slumdogs like himself.
Amanda Coplin
RaveThe Independent (UK)Amanda Coplin follows the path of American epic naturalist writers such as John Steinbeck in her beautifully written debut, in the way she tracks the movement of communities and examines the relationship between people and their environment ... This is a story about loss and yearning and an unusual attempt to create a family ... Coplin describes in beautiful, supple prose how Della defies convention by learning to ride, and her subsequent life as a horsewoman, before her demons throw her off course once more. The author\'s views are fatalistic: her characters will follow the course they\'ve been set upon ... Coplin skilfully evokes her characters\' oneness with the land as she describes the grafting of new branches on to trees; the precise way apricots should be picked; the changing seasons ... From brooding long over deceptively simple ingredients, Coplin has created a psychologically complex novel of considerable emotional power.
Daisy Hildyard
RaveThe Independent (UK)...an erudite but entertaining smorgasbord of anecdote and scholarship, pungently flavoured with reflections on the nature of the historian’s craft ... Although the overarching narrative of this debut novel is perhaps slight, Daisy Hildyard’s skill has been to weave all the disparate elements into a seamlessly structured and utterly absorbing investigation of our relationship with the past ... The writing, with its use of text and image, its mix of conventions from historical account to memoir, has a strong non-fiction feel, the fictional form allowing greater creative freedom ... So rich in texture it deserves many rereadings.
Nora Ikstena, Trans. by Margita Gailitis
PositiveBookOxygenAlthough the oppression of life under Communism infuses this tender tale, Soviet Milk is principally a story about individual character, not politics. There’s no doubt that the mother is a wounded soul, who struggles and fails to be happy, but the author offers no pat answers about why. She is so delicately and warmly evoked, however, that the reader is stirred to empathy rather than impatience ... complexities are carefully portrayed ... The young girl’s narrative is delicately written ... Soviet Milk is a story of ordinary people who are actually extraordinary and that gives it a universal appeal. Despite its elegiac tone, it’s ultimately upbeat because of the sense the writer leaves us with that, despite the system they live under, which stifles what they say and do, their lives matter.
