RaveThe New YorkerGives a momentous relationship its due, with unusual directness ... Interesting ... One of the most endearing aspects of Whitfield’s narrative is the precision and enthusiasm with which he pinpoints all the traits that drew him to Philbrick and kept drawing him in ... Whitfield...has no interest in...self-serving positioning.
Gwendoline Riley
RaveThe New York Review of BooksMy Phantoms is Riley’s sixth novel, and her best. A work of tightly compressed brilliance, it shares many elements with her previous books: a coolly observant narrator, characters who spend a lot of time in distressed contemplation of how their lives look to others, a preoccupation with self-deception and its corrosive effects, a lucidly expressed vision of a grim, stunted Englishness. Much of what makes it so extraordinary is present from its opening lines: Riley can create fully realized characters largely through snatches of speech, sketching out the contours of a dysfunctional relationship in an exchange ... one of the great achievements of My Phantoms is the way it shows how people can become closer even when they remain utterly baffled by each other ... Riley’s language is economical, her style cool, her humor ironic—yet the emotional pitch of the work as a whole is almost intolerably high ... At times I caught myself reading the book as if it were a detective novel, paging backward and forward in an effort to understand how exactly Riley managed to insert such a feral, panicked heartbeat into a work of such impeccable control. I returned to the book over and over again, underlining every second sentence, littering the spaces between paragraphs with question marks, periodically holding it as far away from my face as I could in case I might see something I’d missed earlier.
Diane Cook
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)[Cook] expands the conventions of the climate dystopia genre, moving away from the familiar post-apocalyptic landscape. Her novel takes place in a nearish future, where things are terrible, but in a recognisable way ... As relations between the Community and the Rangers become increasingly fractious and the forces of the outside world begin to erode the boundaries of the Wilderness State, Bea and her daughter face a series of obstacles: the descriptions of how they overcome them often seem to serve as a substitute for character development ... There is something very appealing about these carefully plotted fantasies of human resilience, which invite the reader to imagine how she might survive and even flourish in similar circumstances ... the argument is put forward again and again by various characters who seem to exist primarily for the purpose of making it: the work of survival does not permit such luxuries as sentiment, which in the world of the novel can be defined as caring about anything other than your immediate family, and even about them.
