Editorial reviews

About A Beautiful Crime

The setting is marvelous. Venice isn’t just a scenic background for the action of A Beautiful Crime. Its capricious tides and twisty, deceptive geography seem to mirror the characters’ secrets and intrigues.

About The Gimmicks

The result is engrossing, but McCormick doesn't quite get the ratio right. Fewer gimmicks, ultimately, would have served The Gimmicks well.

About Little Gods

This is a beautiful, intensely moving debut.

About Africaville

This is a penetrating, fresh look at the indomitable spirit of black pioneers and their descendants.

About Nothing to See Here

It's the sweetness of this novel that will melt you, even when it ventures dangerously close to flaming schmaltz, and despite its somewhat predictable (but still satisfying) ending.

About The Divers' Game

If dystopian stories serve as thought experiments, the best ones also function as heart experiments. And with The Divers' Game, Jesse Ball has unsettlingly accomplished both.

About Triangulum

Magnificently disorienting and meticulously constructed, Triangulum couples an urgent subtext with an unceasing sense of mystery. This is a thought-provoking dream of a novel, situated within thought-provoking contexts both fictional and historical.

About The Divers' Game

The novel’s depiction of life in this dystopian world is eerie and suffused with symbolic weight.

About The Divers' Game

Readers who appreciate Ball’s keen, melancholic, and often sadly satirical view of human society will likely appreciate this timely assessment of where division might take us and how it affects the generations that come after us.

About America Was Hard to Find

Uneven and at times frustratingly enigmatic but impressively ambitious and extremely well-written.

About Sea Monsters

It is all about a young woman trying to find who she is and where she is going and what life holds for her.

About The Flight of the Maidens

Gardam’s ability to bring people so fully to life, in such vivid detail, never fails to delight. Such vivid people and dialogue — more than many of her books, I could imagine this as a film.

About The Penalty Area

The Penalty Area is charming, and it’s easy to imagine it being a film. If you need a bookish boost, you can’t go wrong with this story.

About The Hazards of Good Fortune

Overall, a smart, sharp-eyed, entertaining, engrossing story.