Sarah Lyall
Recent Reviews
Sophie Hannah
Positive The New York Times Book Review Hannah’s plots are like intricate jigsaw puzzles whose pieces you cannot believe will fit together, until you see the completed picture. Her denouements tend to make more sense in retrospect than at the time. The fun in reading The Next to Die — even when the scaffolding fails to fully support the structure — isn’t in learning whodunit, but in following the labyrinthine byways of its author’s peculiar worldview and the twisted motives of her characters.
Robert MacFarlane
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"... a remarkable book on language and landscape by the British academic, nature writer and word lover ... For a book so self-effacing and respectful of the words of others, Landmarks is wildly ambitious, part outdoor adventure story, part literary criticism, part philosophical disquisition, part linguistic excavation project, part mash note — a celebration of nature, of reading, of writing, of language and of people who love those things as much as the author does ... This book feels like an antidote to [ugly language], as startling and interesting and fizzy as the word \'zugs,\' which in Exmoor refers to \'little bog islands, about the size of a bucket,\' and is one of dozens of unexpected terms compiled in the glossaries that punctuate this book. They read like poetry ... [Macfarlane\'s] book had such a strong effect on me, and it was more visceral than cerebral.\
Helen Schulman
Positive The New York Times \"... [a] smart, timely and highly entertaining novel ... Schulman deftly moves around, telling her story from various points of view. Sometimes she strays a little far afield — I wasn’t sure I cared about the dating travails of Jack’s girlfriend’s mother, as amusing as they were — but her observations, particularly about the ridiculousness of the Northern Californian start-up mentality, are always apt and sharp.\
Robert Galbraith
Mixed The New York Times Lethal White, the fourth Cormoran Strike mystery, is a big, stuffed-to-the-brim, complicated bouillabaisse of a book, not least because of the busy inner lives of its protagonists ... Because Rowling is so straightforwardly liberal, it’s a pleasant surprise to find that Galbraith is an equal-opportunity satirist. He is just as happy to send up the self-righteous anti-capitalists of the left as the clueless twits of the right ... With a mystery this big and baggy, it can be hard to keep track of who has done what and why ... Lethal White is an old-fashioned novel, by which I mean that it is 650 pages long and that few of its protagonists’ activities, emotions and motivations are left to the reader’s imagination ... all of this is exhaustively described and occasionally exhausting to hear ... At times you might feel as you did when reading the Harry Potter books, particularly later in the series, when they got longer and looser. You love the plot, and you love being in the company of the characters ... At the same time, you long for the existence of a sharp garden implement ... a pair of pruning shears.
Catherine Steadman
Positive The New York Times Steadman brings... qualities of wit, timing and intelligence to this novel... Something in the Water is a proper page-turner, not just a novel produced by a celebrity to whom some wine-weakened publisher said at a cocktail party, \'You should write a book!\'
Lynne Murphy
Rave The New York Times Book Review The Prodigal Tongue addresses not just etymology and usage—who says what and why—but also how history, geography, sociology and psychology have conspired to create, essentially, two different approaches to pronunciation, grammar, diction and spelling ... Murphy’s great love for language radiates from these pages. Adjectives have a \'mad beauty,\' she writes ... Her examples are often funny and always apt. At one point, she discusses American and British approaches to the pesky issue of pronouncing words derived from French. Britons, it emerges, love to abuse Americans for using \'entree\' to mean main course. Googling \'American entree stupid,\' to make this point, she gets seven million hits ... an open-minded argument for tolerance and understanding.
Christopher J. Yates
Positive The New York Times A whydunnit that delves deep into the secrets linking the main characters in this macabre vignette … Twisting backward and forward in time, entering the minds of each character in turn, Yates examines both how they reached this point and what happens years later, when the past wreaks havoc with the present … [Grist Mill Road] is more sophisticated, starting from the fully realized stories the characters are awarded in the service of an elegant narrative … Not all of the motivations ring entirely true, and I’m not sure I fully believe the explanation for the central crime. But it doesn’t really matter. You have to work hard to follow the winding road Yates sends us down, and the drive is full of pleasantly unpleasant surprises.
Philip Pullman
Positive The New York Times La Belle Sauvage sometimes lags. Curiously for such a gifted storyteller, Pullman includes long stretches of flat dialogue in which Malcolm essentially repeats information he has already heard to new people who have not yet heard it. There’s a bit more detail than is necessary about how hard it is to change and feed a baby while escaping a flood in a boat ... I recognize that my expectations are impossibly high and that, in literature as well as in romance, you cannot return to the exact feeling you had before. I’d like to think that Pullman is biding his time, laying down the groundwork for what is yet to come. And even with its longueurs, the book is full of wonder. By the end, when Malcolm and a young woman named Alice embark with Lyra on a perilous watery odyssey replete with strange undersea creatures and various other things not dreamed of in our philosophy, it becomes truly thrilling. It’s a stunning achievement, the universe Pullman has created and continues to build on. All that remains is to sit tight and wait for the next installment.
Gail Godwin
Rave The New York Times Book Review [Godwin] remains a forensically skillful examiner of her characters’ motives, thoughts and behavior. Grief Cottage revisits some of her favorite themes — fractured families, parentless children, the initial shock and long-term repercussions of death and disappearance, how the future can run off course in a flash — to make the very good point that it doesn’t require a ghost to haunt a life ... It’s much to Godwin’s credit that she finds a way to weave all these strands together ... Grief Cottage is in some ways about the search for meaning in the narratives of our lives — the stories we tell others, and especially the stories we tell ourselves.
Alec Baldwin
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...to his surprise (and ours) he pulls himself together and delivers a thorough and sophisticated effort to answer an interesting question: How did an indifferently raised, self-flagellating kid from a just-making-ends-meet, desultorily functioning Long Island family, in Massapequa, turn into Alec Baldwin, gifted actor, familiar public figure, impressively thoughtful person, notorious pugilist? ... The passages about his childhood are beautifully written and unexpectedly moving ... He says that he had no ghostwriter or collaborator for this book. That is impressive, because he’s a highly literate and fluent writer, but it also means that his authorial discipline can abandon him. He has a bit of trouble with transitions.
Ali Smith
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...[a] beautiful, subtle work ... Smith teases out big ideas so slyly and lightly that you can miss how artfully she goes about it ... Smith’s writing is fearless and nonlinear, exploring the connectivity of things: between the living and the dead, the past and the present, art and life. She conveys time almost as if it is happening all at once, like Picasso trying to record an image from every angle simultaneously. Sometimes it’s hard to grasp all the nuance, to corral all the unruly strands into a coherence, especially in Smith’s most Woolfian stream-of-consciousness moments ... The best parts of Autumn, the most moving parts, the transcendent parts, come during Elisabeth and Daniel’s conversations about words, art, life, books, the imagination, how to observe, how to be. Theirs is a conversation that begins mid-paragraph and never ends.
Lucinda Rosenfeld
Rave The New York Times The novel is called Class, but it’s just as preoccupied with race, and Ms. Rosenfeld deserves a great deal of credit for taking on this minefield of a subject ... In a series of skillfully executed set pieces, Rosenfeld skewers the pretensions and preoccupations of women for whom 'parent' is both verb and competitive sport ... It’s easy to make fun of the artisanal-loving hipster bohos of Brooklyn, and many have done it before. Luckily, Ms. Rosenfeld is an astute anthropologist whose satire reaches fresh levels of absurdity ... Ms. Rosenfeld does not mean for us to like Karen all the time, and indeed, the character describes herself as a 'neurotic elitist.' But as we ponder the bigger questions the book poses about race and class in America, subjects bravely tackled by the author through this flawed character, it can be exhausting to be always inside Karen’s brain, with its ricocheting emotions and kamikaze self-analysis.
Lindsey Lee Johnson
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...[an] alarming, compelling and coolly funny debut ... Ms. Johnson’s characters are unpredictable, contradictory and many things at once, which make them particularly satisfying ... For its compassion, its ability to see the humanity inside even the most apparently hopeless person and the shimmering intelligence of its prose, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth reminded me a bit of Rick Moody’s great 1994 novel, The Ice Storm. You end up sympathizing with and aching for even characters who appear to be irredeemable.
Emma Donoghue
Positive The New York Times Book Review [Donoghue] has taken the bare bones of an idea and turned into a full-fledged story about, among other things, the thawing of a woman’s frozen heart. She’s done it in clear, precise cool prose, so we can follow the shifts in Lib’s logic and feeling ... Like Ms. Donoghue’s best-selling Room, the novel ultimately concerns itself with courage, love and the lengths someone will go to protect a child...The feeling is heartbreaking and transcendent and almost religious in itself.
Deborah Levy
Rave The New York Times What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind.
Aziz Ansari & Eric Klinenberg
Positive The New York Times [Modern Romance] a sprightly, easygoing hybrid of fact, observation, advice and comedy, with Mr. Klinenberg, presumably, supplying the medicine — graphs, charts, statistics and the like — and Mr. Ansari dispensing the spoonfuls of sugar that help it go down ... I could have done without some of the statistics and studies, frankly, but they were broken into digestible chunks and so slid by easily. The best part of Modern Romance comes when Mr. Ansari and his team get people to share the most embarrassing aspects of their romantic quests.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Rave The New York Times The great achievement of The Sympathizer is that it gives the Vietnamese a voice and demands that we pay attention ... There are so many passages to admire. Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style absurdities.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Rave The New York Times Book Review No one writes with Austen’s particular sensibility, and no one would really want to; she was perfectly of her time. But Sittenfeld is the ideal modern-day reinterpreter. Her special skill lies not just in her clear, clean writing, but in her general amusement about the world, her arch, pithy, dropped-mike observations about behavior, character and motivation. She can spot hypocrisy, cant, self-­contradiction and absurdity 10 miles away. She’s the one you want to leave the party with, so she can explain what really happened.
Colum McCann
Positive The New York Times In lesser hands, this story could be tedious and self-absorbed: Who wants to read a writer’s writings about writer’s block? But Mr. McCann uses it to show how in fiction, as in life, the possibilities are endless, questions leading to more questions, one thought bleeding into another.
Eka Kurniawan, Trans. by Annie Tucker
Mixed The New York Times It’s all very skillfully done, but it can be a bit overwhelming, as when you take both the cake and the pie at the buffet, or when you go somewhere — the rain forest, the Louvre — where too much is going on at once.