RaveThe Observer (UK)... [an] elusive, chronologically chaotic take on the power dynamics of love ... The tone is melancholic but tender ... The joys of such intimacy, the sympathy between two people in love are elegantly, beautifully written; Riley’s prose shimmering and luminous ... Riley provides few moments in counterbalance to Edwyn’s monstrous behaviour. Their meeting, the first throes of their romance, are not elaborated upon; the odd instances of warmth shared are glossed quickly over. It’s a brutalising, intensely claustrophobic effect, one that shows two people trapped by their own emotions, appalled and attracted by one another in equal measure. While there are conscious echoes and a few nods to Turgenev in this First Love, it’s Harold Pinter who comes most readily to mind during Neve and Edwyn’s combative dialogues ... Riley’s writing has always been clear, focused, still – rather like an Edward Hopper painting – but First Love is fuller, more refined, and underpinned by a suffocating tension. Neve’s self-detachment pushes the novel towards a conclusion that offers glimpses of happiness and ambiguous suggestions of hope, but this is an uncomfortable book – one of naked truths, of unvarnished life, written in sentences that surprise in their collision of beauty and savagery. It shows a writer at the very height of her powers, grappling and snaring her themes into a singular, devastating journey into the ungovernable reaches of the heart.
Sasa Stanišić, Tr. Damion Searls
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... [an] often brilliant novel ... honed and considered, more in control of its material [than Stanišić’s previous book]. It is, at least at first, almost straightforward ... wonderfully alive, vital in its depiction of family life ... It is a refractive prism, this deep delve into the past, so often leading to altered or misleading truths from established facts ... The fallibility of memory is a well-worn trope, but Stanišić’s understanding of how memory can affect the contours of the present is consistently surprising. For all the hatred that stirred the Bosnian war, the overwhelming, sometimes overheated, sense in Where You Come From is love ... The book’s conclusion, though, is a bravura, sustained and singular piece of writing that bursts with wit, heart and empathy. Tricksy as an extended Choose Your Own Adventure section might appear, it brings the novel together as a totality, delivering multiple endings, all of which land deftly in Damion Searls’s excellent translation.
Tom McCarthy
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)It does not take McCarthy long, however, to upset the reader’s expectations; there is to be no painstakingly researched birthing scene, no parental anguish. Instead, a narrative of energy, invention and intelligence begins to take shape: one that is at once dazzling and profoundly resonant ... In a novel burning with ambition, McCarthy sets his goals high and nowhere is this better achieved than in the chapters Serge spends in the air, as a birdman with the Royal Air Force. McCarthy’s prose rises to the challenges presented by aerial flight and his descriptions of the air battles that rage around Serge are chilling, exciting and energetic – filtered as they are through Serge’s increasingly drug-sharpened senses ... In C, as with his previous fiction, McCarthy has attempted to take the avant garde’s concerns and lash them to plot and narrative – and the result is a dizzying, mesmeric and beautifully written work that repays close rereading ... Tom McCarthy has written a novel for our times: refreshingly different, intellectually acute and strikingly enjoyable.
Attica Locke
RaveThe Independent (UK)...superbly written and hugely compelling debut crime novel ... Through Jay Porter, Locke\'s novel moves between these two sides to the city showing a country ultimately divided not by race, but by money ... It may sound like a Hollywood-style thriller, but Black Water Rising\'s depths and concerns are much wider than the simple thrills it also provides ... Locke is excellent at bringing the city to life, the dirt-poor districts and shining new condos, the smart restaurants and strip-club dives; as well as the tawdry emotions and prejudices just below the skin of its residents ... Though writing in a tightly-controlled present tense, Locke does occasionally have a tendency to reach for convoluted similes ... Minor faults in an impressive, well-plotted and intelligent crime drama.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)For those already immersed in Karl Ove’s meticulously rendered life story, Boyhood Island is a departure in structure and purpose. For those yet to read him, it may be a question of wondering what all the fuss is about. It is testament to the power and immediacy of Knausgaard’s writing, however, that both camps are ultimately rewarded with a subtle, burning sense of the lost years of childhood ... Without the breakouts and disjointed chronology, the encyclopaedic exploration of a boy’s humdrum life can seem somewhat wearying and meandering ... Read in context of the sequence as a whole, Boyhood Island lacks the sheer transformative power of the previous volumes, but delivers a vital piece of Karl Ove’s struggle: a struggle to know himself as well as he did as a child.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
PositiveThe Guardian\"It is the thematic progressions, the underlying links between pieces, that make Autumn a source of continued intellectual interest. The constant interplay between life and death, between the material world and the natural realm, between what it means to be human and what it means to be animal ... At his best, Knausgaard can take the breath away, his compressed vignettes delivering the same emotional charge as longer sequences from his previous work ... After the bombast and hype of My Struggle, whatever followed was always likely to be seen in its shadow, and in such a light Autumn can feel something of a coda, or perhaps a bridge to what is to come. And while it is neither a reinvention nor quite a revelation, this first volume of the Seasons Quartet quietly illuminates Knausgaard’s profound gift for making the reader see the world in fresh and unpredictable ways.\
