RaveThe Guardian (UK)An extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20th-century misogyny ... Consistently luxurious ... Elaine is the very model of an unlikable narrator; she’s degraded and her company often feels degrading. But she’s also witty and exhilaratingly blunt, and her darkest opinions are often right on the money.
Kevin Barry
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Barry’s books are known for their stylistic brilliance, and The Heart in Winter is no exception. Terse and acrobatic, the novel effortlessly walks the line between goofy and gothic ... Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised.
Rosalind Brown
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)The character of the solipsistic, over-earnest, pretentious, self-consciously ascetic Annabel is also brilliantly done ... If Practice has a weakness, it’s that, at heart, it’s rather traditional ... It means something that, despite my fidgeting, I both enjoyed and admired this novel. It was mostly a pleasure to travel in a lonely country most people wouldn’t even call story, to dwell in the satisfactions and strangeness of less when it’s just less.
Hari Kunzru
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The use of artworks – a difficult trick in fiction – is especially impressive ... Effortless ... As a whole, Blue Ruin is bracingly intelligent and often just plain beautiful. It’s a reminder that fiction, at its best, is a place to encounter new experiences and dwell in big ideas. Kunzru is known for ambitious novels that bring politics to rich, imaginative life; Blue Ruin shows him at the top of his game.
A. K. Blakemore
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Remarkable for its beautiful language ... Blakemore clearly knows the revolutionary period, and sees it from an unexpected angle ... Not a flawless novel ... The character of Tarare never quite coheres ... The plot and tone can also be unstable. Characters do extreme things without explanation ... However, The Glutton’s weakest passages are more interesting than most novels’ strongest ones.
Jen Beagin
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A fluffy sex comedy with a dark underbelly. In fact, its dark underbelly has a darker underbelly, which is then startlingly fluffy. There are multiple trauma plotlines ... The voice is sharp, the plot is compelling, the jokes are funny and sometimes startling, as the very best comedy is; it’s easy to forgive the odd moments when two elements clash. What is sometimes a problem is Beagin’s excessive use of quirky details. Everything and everyone is manically peculiar ... Often the action stops dead while the characters deal with the latest beasts and grotesques, and it can come to feel as if there is a hive of 60,000 quirks living in the novel’s ceiling. This becomes jarring in the sections dealing with suicide and its aftermath, a subject that just doesn’t want to be silly. But the book is salvaged, time and again, by Beagin’s formidable wit and her ability to write. Every page is packed with good jokes, keen observations and idiosyncratically wonderful prose ... In my darker moments as a reviewer, I sometimes wonder if book reviews are even useful, given that different readers have such different tastes. With this book I found a sort of answer. I can recommend it even to people who might end up hating it. It made my brain do interesting, uncomfortable things and left me questioning my beliefs about attraction, grief, how recovery works, and a dozen other fundamental things. It can be offensive, frustrating, even unconvincing, but it’s never boring. It’s giddy fluff with lashings of grit and a touch of holy fire.
Lydia Millet
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Nothing could be more readable and frictionless than this book. The dialogue flows; the characters rise naturally off the page; the scenes rise and fall in perfect cadences. It’s particularly masterful how Millet develops Gil’s fascination with birds, weaving closely observed descriptions of them into a text that is otherwise very blank. It is as though within the prose itself, we feel them threatened by a hostile human environment ... The trouble here is that, from page one, Gil is never anything but good. He has no dark places, no dark thoughts, no struggles with internal demons ... The conflicts in the book mostly involve other good people being unfairly treated, and Gil waltzing in to solve the problem by giving kindly advice ... Even Gil’s money, which is framed as a kind of original sin, is carefully sanitised by the author ... Millet has written a book about the attempt to live a moral life that dodges every moral issue ... This dodging is not always successful. Readers may notice that while environmental destruction is an underlying theme, the book never addresses its possible relationship to the life choices of people who buy castle-sized houses in desert areas like Arizona ... I’m sure there will be readers for whom this book is balm to a weary soul. It can be comforting, certainly, to read about the unfailing goodness of people who never want for funds. As mentioned above, Millet is exceptionally skilled at what she does. Even though this book is mostly very quotidian, it is never boring, and she can make you interested in what happens even to her least convincing characters. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is feeling cynical, but if you were craving the literary equivalent of a Ted Lasso Christmas episode, this might be exactly what you need.
Nell Zink
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Zink is both a very satisfying and a frustrating writer. Her plots are shapeless but oddly propulsive. Her narrative style is a tissue of quips that strays into glibness, even in her best work ... Zink likes to situate her characters within subcultures ... The great flaw in Avalon’s conception is that Zink tries to work this trick with the lowlife world of the Hendersons, but without the intimacy or the love. She has nothing but contempt for these characters, and they remain vague and one-dimensional ... It’s still a pleasure, and will give you more that’s genuinely new than 99% of books to be published this year.
Rebecca Scherm
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe novel makes us feel the terror of a 2030s Earth where extreme weather events are so common that whole cities routinely burn to the ground and even the affluent have become nomadic, always one step ahead of natural disasters ... the reader never loses the sense of how precarious this existence is, and how terrifying it is to depend on the whims of corporate bosses for one’s survival. In that regard, it feels a lot like life on Earth in 2022. The author’s clear, relatable voice and close personal focus make the book compulsively readable ... Scherm manages the difficult trick of making us care about...essentially unsympathetic characters, but neglects to explain how Views is meant to work, or why hiring Tess to watch their subjects go to the bathroom would be of use. Similar weaknesses undercut the novel’s ending, which focuses on individual emotions in a way that feels increasingly trivial, while failing to offer a convincing resolution to the political and environmental crises. But in general, A House Between the Earth and the Moon is a thought-provoking and absorbing read.
Robin McLean
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The book is extraordinarily capacious, often casually ranging in one paragraph through the experiences of all the animals in the scene. It travels back in geological time to the formation of the land on which the story takes place ... It’s full of casually perfect writing, especially about animals and nature ... The crux of this review is that Pity the Beast is a work of crazy brilliance. It’s a worthy successor to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and the rare book that creates more space for later writers to work in. Everything McLean does is interesting. She writes dialogue in a way that’s truly ingenious, using it as a Greek chorus that often threatens to turn into music ... Convincingly mythic, and the many biblical references feel integral ... McLean explodes the idea of human society in the first scene, explicitly equating people with beasts, then spends the rest of the novel exploring what it is to be a beast, what it is to be a mind, what it is to be alive. In a literary environment dominated by safe, simple, realist prose, it’s thrilling to see a novel with this much intellectual heft and aesthetic fearlessness ... If I have any reservations, it’s that Pity the Beast is high gothic, and while it has the strengths of the form in spades, it also has its excesses ... The plot is a little incoherent, and the characters’ choices are motivated by metaphorical necessity, not by any recognisable psychology ... Sometimes, in the midst of an action scene, it becomes impossible to tell what’s happening as everything disappears behind a cloud of great writing. The grandest, most hyper-significant passages have one foot in meaninglessness ... I do tend, though, to find the gothic ridiculous – and for me, this book was a reminder that, when you make it work, it’s absolutely glorious. Pity the Beast is hallucinatory and ribald and unaccountable, with serious things to say about society and the nature of mind. It reminds you that stream-of-consciousness is fascinating in the right hands, that tastelessness is a power, and that plot is not the only thing fiction knows how to do. Every time you try to resist its charms, it knocks you down again with careless beauty. Even when it stumbles, it stumbles more gracefully than most books dance.
Lisa Taddeo
MixedThe Guardian (UK)The idea is boldly handled, and the writing is often exceptionally good. The book is packed with elegant observations ... Many scenes have a hallucinatory wildness, and Taddeo is remarkably sharp on the politics of attraction ... Taddeo also has a penchant for strange images...These can be distracting and even confusing, but whatever the style is, it’s never boring ... Unfortunately, the novel goes fatally awry in a couple of significant ways. First, the character of Joan is radically one-dimensional. She’s a victim of sexual trauma who has no interests apart from sex and trauma. She never reads a book, watches TV, listens to music, or does anything practical. She has no memories of anything but trauma and sex. There are various scenes at her past jobs, but we never find out what she did there – or rather, all she seems to have done there was have unwanted sex. Even her parents are insistently sexualised ... The second problem is that the plot has a careening outlandishness that is often incoherent and always at odds with its serious content. Every choice the characters make is perverse, and much of the dialogue consists of unmotivated confessional speeches ... This excess is probably intended as a kind of Los Angeles gothic, but Taddeo simply doesn’t have enough control to make it work, and it ultimately borders on parody. The narration also wanders erratically; Joan can’t get through a traumatic scene without being distracted by memories of other traumatic events, until the hopping from misery to atrocity just becomes confusing ... Surprisingly often, when I give a book a negative review, it’s with a painful sense of the book it could have been, if it had had one more substantial rewrite. I felt this more with Animal than I have with almost any other book. It’s not a bad book, not really; it’s a great book that swallowed a ton of terrible ideas it couldn’t digest. Even in this state, it has more intelligence than many novels I would wholeheartedly recommend. It’s ambitious and abrasive and unsparing. It has its own aesthetic and its own worldview. But as it stands, it’s not a great novel; it’s a great missed opportunity.
Steven Hall
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)This book is showily postmodern, full of odd typographical elements, altered realities and intertextual jokes. Everything that happens is not just a plot point but a reference to that kind of plot point in other narratives. The psychology of the characters is deliberately stylised and artificial; the world they live in is supposed to be a comic-book universe with little plausibility. Even the sloppiness of the plot can be seen as an extended joke about the theme of entropy that runs through the book, and a play on Cupid’s Engine , the novel as a perfect, completely orderly machine. All this may seem convoluted, but Hall’s remarkably charming voice carries him past plot tangles that would have felled a less confident author, and the story develops in genuinely startling and ingenious directions ... consistently fun and often impressive. I suspect a reader’s experience of it will largely depend on their appetite for its genre.
Deb Olin Unferth
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... strange and brilliant ... If the book has a weakness, it’s in its relationship with the farming community in which it’s set...its least appealing element is how it draws rural, working-class lives as one-dimensional, meaningless and devoid of emotional connection...Presumably, [Unferth] is trying to make the point that all life is turning into a battery farm experience, but since only the rural working-class characters get this treatment, it remains jarring ... The chicken-related writing, however, is a force unto itself. If you thought you didn’t care about chickens, Unferth is here to prove you wrong. Throughout, she makes us feel them as minds ... The meticulous, science-fictional descriptions of the alien atmosphere of factory farming are also astonishing ... Perhaps from a fear of anthropomorphism, though, Unferth almost entirely forgoes making the chickens characters in their own right. We’re told the birds have names for each other, but none of them emerges as a personality; we’re told they are highly social creatures, but never see their relationships. None of the humans ever develops a bond with a particular chicken, either, so it’s hard to become emotionally invested in the heist’s success. The book’s realism also works against our caring: we’re repeatedly reminded that battery hens are unsuited to life outside and that, even as an act of public protest, their liberation is unlikely to change anything. It’s a tribute to Unferth’s charm that this never becomes depressing, and she even delivers a kind of happy ending ... Ultimately, although the book is uneven, the things in Barn 8 that work are so aesthetically perfect and philosophically profound that it doesn’t matter much if the caper plot falls a little flat, or if its depiction of working-class life feels heavy-handed. It’s an enthralling book whose parts are more than the sum of its whole. Most of all, it’s marvellously effective in making us feel the crisis at its centre: the everyday torture of billions of animals in the service of a system that will ultimately destroy us all.
Deepa Anappara
RaveThe Guardian (UK)It’s difficult to convey what’s so special about Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line without spoilers, but suffice to say it’s transformed utterly by its concluding chapters. In a day, our child narrator changes beyond recognition, and through his eyes, the world he inhabits does too. A book that started by feeling like a cute comic novel about a ragtag gang of poor kids who ingeniously defeat the baddies turns into an unsparing portrayal of the real world. In this world, stories will not save your life, and, if the powerful will not protect them, poor kids can never be safe. There is no fun adventure story to be told about the trafficking of children ... This is a first novel, and it has some of the clumsiness that goes with that. The bad characters can feel like caricatures; at moments, Jai’s voice isn’t convincing as that of a child. Sometimes, too, the political message can be a little heavy-handed. But in the end Anappara, a journalist with a background in reporting on poverty and religious violence, delivers something more powerful and complex than the vast majority of more highly crafted novels. The narrative goes beyond portraying how the poor of India have been betrayed by their government, and suggests they might also be betrayed by the stories we like to tell about them. Jai has to grow up overnight: this book asks that the reader does, too.
Dave Eggers
MixedThe Guardian (UK)The Trump presidency has been exhaustively assailed by satirists, and it’s not Eggers’s fault if this parable feels overfamiliar. That he nonetheless makes his story engaging, disturbing and sometimes genuinely funny is a testament to his skill as a writer. This, combined with the pleasure many take in seeing Trump lampooned, will make the book a reliable stocking-filler in left-leaning homes ... That said, it’s mostly composed of the easiest jokes available: Trump as ignoramus, Trump as fat man, Trump as man-baby, Trump wanting to sleep with his daughter, Trump turning into a breathless teenage girl at the approach of the manly Putin ... It is possible this is meant to subtly mock people who believe impeaching Trump is all that’s needed to Make America Great Again, but the few who still harbour this belief will finish the book reassured that Eggers agrees. The broad comedy also becomes jarring as the mass murders of foreigners and dissidents escalate, culminating in a dinner thrown by a Kim Jong-un figure that features a hollowed-out corpse turned into a trough for guacamole. The cartoon gore feels dehumanising when the authoritarians being satirised have real victims ... In general, it is successful as a gift book, whose better jokes can be read aloud to approving chuckles after Christmas dinner. As a significant satire of the political crisis in America, it falls woefully short.
Merritt Tierce
RaveThe GuardianMerritt Tierce’s debut novel is a stylishly brutal account of the life of a waitress working in a series of Texas restaurants ... The prose is laconic, vernacular; at first, the book seems like a well-executed but predictable entry in the genre of trauma lit. As it develops, however, it moves in a far more interesting direction ... Sex scenes and restaurant scenes bleed into each other; they have the same dissociated feeling and adrenaline rush ... Throughout, the story is elevated by Tierce’s fierce and elegant writing. The pace is that of a cocaine binge, and the voice moves from big-hearted to heartless to maudlin with the frank dispatch of a waitress dealing with a demanding dinner crowd. It is also quietly funny ... There are points at which the plot wanders ... Sometimes Marie’s voice feels a little glib; cool for cool’s sake. But these brief lapses scarcely matter: the scenes are too powerful, too real. We are unequivocally along for the ride. It is also heartening to read an American novel that takes working-class life seriously. Here, the world of waiting tables is an arena large enough for tragedy and glory, and Tierce is not documenting the lives of its people from the viewpoint of an anthropologist, but singing them as their Homer ... Nor does the heroic tone feel like hyperbole. It is the size of life seen from the inside – because we are never in any doubt that these are Tierce’s people. She is not just telling stories about them, she is bearing witness on their behalf, and she does so with a wholly writerly – that is, ruthless – love.
Bridget Collins
RaveThe GuardianIn many ways, The Binding is an unpretentious work of escapist fiction. The morality of the book is simple; the good are essentially noble and their enemies unambiguously wicked ... But while some elements are overfamiliar, every detail is bracingly specific and real ... Collins also masterfully conveys the interior life of her characters, particularly the altered states of love, and the book becomes truly spellbinding as Emmett is drawn vertiginously toward sexual love and its dazzling aftermath ... The Binding becomes a parable of \'Don’t ask, don’t tell\' and the #MeToo movement, one that makes it clear that even our memories can be colonized ... Many readers of The Binding will simply sink gratefully into the pleasures of its pages, because, like all great fables, it also functions as transporting romance.
Nico Walker
PositiveThe Guardian\"The prose remains simple, but now it’s clearly skating over enormous depths, and Walker’s clear-sighted assessments of the army and the war cut effortlessly through generations of propaganda ... It’s true that Cherry often feels more like an improbably perfect series of war stories told in a bar than a novel. There are no real character arcs, and the relationships have no ultimate meaning; they last or fall apart for reasons the narrator doesn’t even try to understand. The plot refuses to yield significance. Throughout, the most exalted prose is devoted to drug experiences ... This all means that, despite the author’s remarkable storytelling ability, the novel can feel static. The peril is so constant it threatens to be boring. Nothing can happen but more of the same. But that is also part of what makes the book exceptional and what makes it true ... This is a book that feels casually hilarious if you read a couple of pages; if you read a chapter it becomes impressive; and by the time you’ve finished, it’s devastating.\
Jennifer Clement
PositiveThe GuardianThroughout the novel, Clement maintains the intoxicating potency of the language. Gun Love is reminiscent of gushing lyrics you can imagine singing in the throes of crazy grief. Clement also deftly works in phantasmagoric touches reminiscent of books such as Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love ... We gradually lose the sense of Pearl as a human being. She becomes a stylised representation of a lost child, a vehicle for pathos. Sometimes the prose slips into the mawkishness that is the great attendant hazard of lyricism ... Despite these problems, the inventiveness and charm of Clement’s narrative voice are such that Gun Love never stops being a pleasure to read. Every paragraph is nutty and passionate and glamorous, and there’s even something winningly vulgar about the way the plot treats serious topics as a backdrop for melodrama. Even in the weakest sections of the narrative, there are moments of gritty magic. It’s a cup of sugar and a great pop ballad. That’s more than enough to make the book both readable and fun. It isn’t quite enough to make us care.
Curtis Dawkins
MixedThe GuardianIt’s hard to imagine approaching this debut collection of short stories, set in the US prison system, without the knowledge that Curtis Dawkins is a prisoner serving a life sentence without parole ... The existence of violence is acknowledged, but it’s left at the margins of the narrative ...Dawkins has a genius for bringing characters to life and making mundane situations compelling, if only because they feel so real ... Most of the characters reflect on the past; the empty days of prison become a mirror in which they continually face the shortcomings that brought them here ... is a debut, and like most debuts, it isn’t perfect. It has its overwrought images, its passages of cod Denis Johnson, its ill-judged foray into magical realism.
Arundhati Roy
MixedThe Dallas Morning NewsThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness begins with Anjum, a Hijra — one of India's traditionally accepted transgender women. We follow her through her childhood and her coming of age as trans; from the outset, these sections have the bewitching prose, the bracing idiosyncrasy, the seductive pathos that made Roy's first book a universal favorite. However, the plot soon begins to meander ... there's no question that this novel is a pleasure to read. Roy is, above all, a lovable writer and, despite its frustrating qualities, this book has a lot to love. It's just a shame Roy didn't rein in a little more of her signature messiness.
Daniel Magariel
PositiveThe GuardianPerhaps the most painful part of this book is its depiction of how victims can collude with an abuser. The boys don’t just cover up for their father, they hurt each other at his command, and in one particularly ugly flashback, take part in the physical abuse of their mother. Magariel’s portrayal of this process is remarkably lucid and unsparing. Some passages feel so true, you keep wanting to put the book down to applaud ... While the low-life characters and grim settings are wonderfully drawn, you begin to wonder: could Albuquerque really be that bad? ... Abusive relationships can make victims feel their identity has been stripped away, that nothing remains of them but a series of reactions dictated by the abuser’s behaviour. One wishes Magariel had been able to evoke this experience while also conveying that it’s not true. This is not to dismiss what he has achieved. In one of his many crises, the father challenges his sons, 'Tell me one true thing about life … Either of you. Tell me one true thing.' Magariel has triumphantly, unforgettably, told us one true thing.
Roxane Gay
MixedThe GuardianGay is a writer of formidable charm and intellect, with a knack for intriguing premises. She is especially masterful at writing striking openings ... Where there are flaws in individual stories, they are those one would expect from someone who is by temperament a popular writer. Gay’s language is powerful but sometimes careless, which can result in Fifty Shades prose...But we’re generally carried past these clumsy details by the force of Gay’s narrative voice ... In Difficult Women, abuse only occurs in the context of sex...Gay’s complex investment in this issue can produce fascinating results. But in most of the stories, the handling feels self-indulgent, even exploitative; it produces a torrid heat, but sheds no light.
Charlotte Wood
RaveThe GuardianThe Natural Way of Things is a savagely, unapologetically feminist book; a throwback to writers like Joanna Russ and Angela Carter, who landed blows on the patriarchy without worrying about being labelled man-haters ... The Natural Way of Things is chillingly dark and unfashionably didactic. But it’s also compulsively readable, and bears its load of significance with effortless power. The fury of contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.
Garth Risk Hallberg
PanThe Guardian“City on Fire often reminded me of Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, an interesting book of obvious talent marred by pedestrian writing and half-baked characters. Here, the plot is more ambitious, and the style more richly lyrical, but the reader is left with a similar feeling of reading a messy early draft.”
