RaveFinancial Times (UK)Intermezzo sees Rooney return to exceptional form with a novel as clever as...Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as...Normal People ... Nothing much else happens. And yet what Rooney offers instead is enough: characters rendered in a kind of literary pointillism, interiorities that feel so real they vibrate, inwardness turned utterly out. In Intermezzo, her usually spare style meets something more impressionistic ... If there’s weakness to the novel, it may be in the depiction of the subsidiary female characters ... Rooney points us to something deeper about the nature of relationships.
Catherine Lacey
RaveFinancial Times (UK)A meticulously assembled work, complete with fictional footnotes for invented interviews ... More than a mystery. It’s a thriller set against a backdrop of political intrigue, an elegy, an art world satire and a thought experiment too ... Almost certainly one of the most interesting books you’ll read this year.
Sarah Gilmartin
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Observant ... It’s a sorrowful work, alert to the nuances of family life – the terrifying volatility and the stubborn loyalties – that make it such a crucible for drama ... Sarah Gilmartin wrangles these time frames and locations deftly enough, but she dangles the mystery of Elaine’s death so early and often in the novel that, at times, it feels like a visible device, clumsily prodding us to read on ... Gilmartin is at her best, though, in the set pieces that lay bare the dynamics of family life, from the bitterly rowing parents to the slow estrangement of siblings ... A novel about a monstrous mother and dysfunctional siblings may not seem to cover new literary ground, but Gilmartin is as interested in what keeps the family together as what tears it apart.
Eleanor Catton
RaveFinancial Times (UK)A thriller, with a cast of conscientious eco-warriors, a frustrated amateur journalist and a smooth-talking billionaire villain with a dastardly plan ... This is a deeply enjoyable, action-packed book, an accomplished new offering ... Exceptional storytelling ... Wry, warm humour ... Catton’s heart-racing thriller keeps us guessing to the end. But if there’s danger everywhere, there’s hope too — and that’s a remarkable accomplishment.
Monica Heisey
MixedThe Guardian (UK)The seemingly tireless facility for jokes and comic self-deprecation can also be wearing. It risks a certain glibness, allowing Heisey to skate over the more serious concerns buried inside the book: the deep feelings of brokenness and loss that come in the wake of a failed relationship. These are often glimpsed, before inevitably giving way to a joke ... There’s certainly a breezy confidence to Heisey’s mode of storytelling via text messages and Tinder correspondence, but quickfire DM exchanges in an age of internet dating can also read like comedy sketches, obstructing the possibility of real insight. It’s a shame, since Heisey clearly recognises that for modern singletons navigating the online dating market.
Jo Hamya
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Hamya’s observations are biting and truthful ... Hamya is most successful when she stages her heroine’s alienation in these set pieces. At other times, her prose veers into the style of a newspaper opinion piece. It’s not that this is unpersuasive, rather that it breaks the book’s spell ... Hamya’s writing isn’t always skilled, but she is astute at portraying a new young precariat, rich in culture and education, but poor in housing and job opportunities ... Hamya’s narrator feels this injustice keenly, but the difficulty is that she doesn’t seem to feel very much else. Others passingly remark of her \'You look a bit sad\' and \'You look a bit clueless\', but if Hamya is intending to signal alienation, it also means that her heroine isn’t great company for the reader. The surrounding characters – the Oxford neighbour, a semi-famous Instagram star, the wealthy staff at the magazine – are all thinly sketched ciphers of entitlement. Still, this is a novel in which disaffection feels real – and, at the novel’s end, the wraith-like heroine finds a heartstoppingly dramatic expression of her distress.
Avni Doshi
RaveThe Guardian (UK)It’s Antara’s internal conflict that forms the novel’s central theme: how do you take care of a mother who once failed to take care of you? Antara examines the question with a self-inspection so unflinching that it makes you catch your breath ... The ashram scenes are, by far, the most intriguing part of the novel, but Doshi, disappointingly, doesn’t allow us to linger here, refusing perhaps to indulge any readerly appetite for exoticism or prurience. What interests her is how, in these squalid circumstances, Tara finds liberation, and how hard it is for Antara to distinguish between her mother’s pursuit of self-determination and acts of selfishness ... Tara is monstrous, but the strength of Doshi’s book is that it resists showing only monstrosity. Her spare and unsentimental writing allows us a glimpse of something more: the suffocation of motherhood and frustrations so powerful she \'would bang her body against the wall and scream silently to herself\' ... Dementia, though, is the novel’s real impasse and Doshi handles this thoughtfully ... This is an intelligent debut, deserving of its Booker shortlisting. Burnt Sugar is sorrowful, sceptical and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters.
An Yu
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Weird things keep happening in An Yu’s debut novel, Braised Pork ... Yu’s novel is part domestic noir and part esoteric folk myth. It’s also a story about a young woman finding her feet in modern metropolitan China. It all makes for a compelling, if perplexing, read ... Yu’s prose is plain, but her novel is plotted so unpredictably that it accomplishes an almost accidental brilliance – she writes as though she is constantly changing her mind ... The idea of a journey of self-discovery via Tibetan mysticism might raise a sceptic’s eyebrow, but Yu makes it meaningful ... he merit of this book is how fluently it moves between metropolitan Beijing – with its unhappy marriages, hazy polluted air and expensive property market – and a stranger, more hallucinogenic realm of Tibetan myth and folk culture ... There are clunky moments, but this is a sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood as it is set free from the suffocating constraints of marriage and comes up for air.
Lily King
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a puzzling and beautiful novel about writing and love. Its beauty lies in its precise observations ... What’s puzzling about the novel is how swiftly and intensely its quiet heroine captures your attention ... There’s a stomach-churning pathos to the paucity of her resources and a dogged naivety in her commitment to writing in such meagre circumstances. King makes her struggles feel monumental, grindingly bleak. Yet somehow, Casey takes hold with a vice-like grip on your heart. Reading the book feels like waiting for clouds to break—a kind of gorgeous agony ... But it’s funny, too. King leavens Casey’s misery with a wry, undaunted humour ... The romances are charming and believable. And King writes children with a palpable tenderness ... Most of all, King writes writers with a rare acuity ... it’s hard not to feel that King...is telling us the truest things she knows.
Yelena Moskovich
PositiveThe GuardianThe quickest way to describe Yelena Moskovich’s novels is to say that her books are like David Lynch films. This, at least, is the comparison reviewers resort to most frequently to convey her surreal and lyrical style ... an arrestingly self-assured follow-up to her 2016 debut The Natashas ... Moskovich wears her weirdness with an indifferent dignity: Virtuoso is nonchalantly cool, heedlessly independent and puzzlingly askew. It’s also hard to resist ... Filmic, here, is the right word and yet still not enough ... Moskovich’s turn of phrase, often unexpected and poetically cryptic, that makes us see it ... Moskovich pulls this off with some skill, moving confidently between timeframes and narrators ... She is especially alert to how visceral and disconnected the experience of a body can be ... In the end, though, Virtuoso is entirely Moskovich, told in her idiosyncratic voice and informed by her strange sensibility. In its weaker moments, that strangeness can leave readers confounded ... At its best, though, Moskovich’s writing is compulsive and determined in its efforts to get at desire, grief and love.
Guy Gunaratne
PositiveThe GuardianA tinderbox of a novel. It asks what constitutes a community, knowing all the while how fragile communities are and how febrile they can feel ... a tense read about young men with foreclosed futures, the dread of violence and the sense of alienation they feel, written from the inside ... [Gunaratne] can delineate the particulars of a place while making it seem like a neighbourhood you might know, if only seen in passing ... Gunaratne keeps us resolutely in his characters’ idiom. It makes his prose choppy, sometimes pounding with a kind of systolic-diastolic pressure ... The book captures a feeling of foreboding, the sense of a future that is uncertain and volatile.
Sebastian Faulks
PositiveThe GuardianThe merit of the book is its plot, the constituent parts turning in different directions before falling into place ... Not quite magic realism, the novel veers close to the mawkish time-travel territory of the 1990s TV series Goodnight Sweetheart.. This is a puzzling novel, not entirely successful in its voices and devices, but brimming with Faulks’s deep affection for Paris.
Diana Evans
PositiveThe Financial Times\"But the agony of ordinary life is also what makes Ordinary People an absorbing read. Evans gives us an entirely believable account of relationships, recognising how they defeat us, encircle us and leave us gasping for air ... Evans presents a sympathetic and smartly satirical portrait of metropolitan-minded thirtysomethings, as they come to terms with their thwarted youth and wilted ambitions ... The fact of race is always there in the novel — Melissa, Michael and Damian variously reflect on their heritage — but there is something radical in how Evans depicts the ordinary lives of young black people, faithfully, fully and quietly.\
