PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBy the end of this sorrowful, tender, sometimes beautiful book, it becomes apparent that it is not those mythic Lahore fields that Masud has been trying to find, but rather a terrestrial analogue for her own sense of desolation.
Eliane Brum
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe prose — riddling, elliptical, sometimes convoluted — is no walk in the park, nor is it meant to be ... Brum may be suspicious of the \'dogma of hope,\' then, but she never lapses into cynicism or despair. She offers instead community, solidarity, resourcefulness and a bracing defiance.
Sally Hayden
RaveFinancial Times (UK)While the migrant trail takes Hayden as far as Liberia and Rwanda, her book is not, chiefly, a compilation of field dispatches. Her most startling reporting on this most global of subjects is done from her London flat. And yet Hayden’s account is no less immediate or distressing for her physical remoteness. It is indeed that very remoteness that affords her such intimate access to her subjects, most of whom know her only as a Twitter profile picture ... Hayden is scathing about agencies established, in principle, to aid refugees on the ground ... The book’s accumulation of abuses and neglect and pleading voices builds to a dizzying cacophony. No cry of pain is extraneous. Reading it can feel like being beseeched by a desperate crowd, but My Fourth Time, We Drowned is journalism of the most urgent kind.
Kapka Kassabova
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Borders and their intrinsic, deforming violence remain Kassabova’s subject. But in this book she goes further, tracing the intrusion of those cracks deeper into the souls and psyches of successive generations, herself included ... Kassabova has never been interested in derring‑do; the perils she encounters are of the psychic variety, and they are genuine ... To the Lake’s objective is not healing so much as reconciliation, a quest for spiritual wholeness ... The narrative performs another kind of reconciliation, too. A characteristic of modern travel writing is a patchwork, broken-mirror approach to form: short, lapidary encounters; the micro-patterning of images and tales and meditations – a tendency attributable to modernism as much as to the impressionistic, stop-start nature of any journey. It was partly the compound facets of Border that accounted for its miraculous glimmer. To the Lake is more languid and more patient, as fluid and inexorable as the underground watercourses that connect the two lakes. The book’s achievement, likewise, is to reconcile, thrillingly, what those twin bodies of water represent to Kassabova: the unconscious and the conscious; the darkness of history and the radiance of life and love.
Ben Ehrenreich
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewEhrenreich remembers a speech given by the president after his first State of the Union address, in which he lamented the difficulty of unifying the country. \'Without a major event where people pull together,\' Trump said, \'that’s hard to do.\' That “Desert Notebooks was written before the coming of Covid-19 only makes it feel more, rather than less, timely. Read two months into lockdown, it feels creepily prescient: We are all living in the desert now ... To observe that these notes from arid America, vivid though they are, lack weight is not a criticism, since they are really only the framework for a series of learned, arcane, startlingly original mini-essays — on Mayan cosmology, on colonialism, on black holes, on the racist elisions and misdirections of ethnologists, and on the suppression and distortion of Indigenous knowledge. Ehrenreich’s scholarly reflections serve to locate the origin of America’s present crisis in the atrocities of its founding; but the root causes he identifies are above all epistemological, and far older than America ... It’s probably inevitable that a book that critiques the linear model of time will also be ambivalent about both the act of writing itself and the clicking rosary that is narration. Desert Notebooks sometimes seems to aspire to the atomized condition of sand. Writing itself is invariably a form of plunder, Ehrenreich accepts ... Out of love and despair (where else does art come from?), [Ehrenreich] has built a potent memorial to our own ongoing end-times.
Aleksandar Hemon
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)It isn’t a criticism to say that [Hemon\'s] latest publication, a kind of bipartite memoir or autobiographical diptych, is a broken book. Dispersion, diffusion, disjointedness, decentralisation — these have always been both themes and characteristics of Hemon’s writing. The back-cover text suggests readers start with My Parents: An Introduction, a tender, unshowy, patient telling of Hemon’s parents’ flight to Canada and the unfolding of their new lives ... This Does Not Belong to You, the second book, comprises 86 more-or-less oblique scenes from Hemon’s prewar life...painted with Hemon’s eye for the tellingly uncanny or grotesque ... My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You sometimes feels strained. Its halves repel one another. But even if it reads more like an abridgment of the greater book than a new chapter, there are few living authors who illuminate so heartbreakingly the wormholes between present and past, or who are so merciless in recovering the symbol-saturated, eerily lit land that is childhood.
Francisco Cantú
RaveThe Guardian\"Told in three progressively more soul-searching parts, Francisco Cantú’s memoir of his nearly four years as a border patrol agent describes the borderlands and his work there with a raw-nerved tenderness that seems to have been won from both the landscape and, disconcertingly, the violence he was implicated in ... There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s spareness in Cantú’s eschewal of speech marks and his rendering of Spanish dialogue untranslated. The unflinching quality of the author’s gaze, both inward and outward, recalls the same lineage. But there is an emotional generosity in the writing that sets Cantú apart. Perhaps his most concrete influence is the \'vast and smouldering\' terrain of southern Arizona – malpaís, or bad country, where volcanic processes seem to have calmed only momentarily.\
