PositiveThe Independent (UK)While there is no shortage of books that celebrate the glory of music journalism, Kessler’s book is arguably one of the first to offer a post-mortem of sorts ... In a smooth blend of the personal and polemical, he maps out the co-ordinates using moments from his own music career ... The book’s sense of place is admirable ... The reader spends a beat too long in the Parisian banlieues with Kessler ... Ultimately, Paper Cuts reads as a Valentine to an industry and magazine that, far from burning out spectacularly, faded away at the hands of British publisher bigwigs.
Maggie O'Farrell
RaveIrish Independent (IRE)As historical fiction tropes go, the virginal naive yearning to provide an impassive husband a dynasty heir is fairly careworn by now. Yet O’Farrell has managed to breathe entirely new life into this plot with a 16th-century world that is brimming with detail and colour ... Exhaustively researched and helped along by a great imagination, O’Farrell’s Florence leaps from the page ... The subject of her latest historical fiction novel is a compelling choice, and one whose brief life lends itself well to tension and intrigue ... Her account of Lucrezia is a deeply humane one ... The Marriage Portrait is a divine union of well-drawn characters, the transportive power of period detail, and the sleight of hand of a writer at the top of her game.
Emma Jane Unsworth
PositiveThe Independent (IRE)From Dawn O\'Porter\'s So Lucky to Sophie White\'s Filter This, several novels have already honed in on the chasm between the IRL self and the online self. Yet Unsworth\'s is in a class of its own, pinpointing perfectly the discomfiting tangle between the person we project out into the world, and the sheer effort required to upkeep the charade ... Unsworth tempers any tonal unease with plenty of spiky, current humour ... Some readers might find Adult\'s humour slightly too rich, and knowing. It\'s certainly relentless, yet the quickfire one-liners are a neat reflector of Jenny\'s frenzied interiority, and her lupine hunger for approval. With a dusting of ribald wit on every page, it comfortably falls (for me at least), on the right side of entertaining ... Adults is zeitgeisty, and its humour couched in current argot. Will Unsworth\'s third novel stand the test of time and become a classic to withstand the ages? The jury is out. But like the works of Ephron and Dunham before it, a detailed look at how women live in the face of massive societal expectation won\'t fall out of fashion.
