Editorial reviews

About America Was Hard to Find

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

About The Mother-in-Law

A mesmerizing domestic mystery.

About Sherwood

All things said, this was a delightful gender-flipped origin story, and I loved it very much. (Probably tied with No Good Deed as my favorite modern Robin Hood retelling.) Absolutely recommended.

About The Refugees

In The Refugees Nguyen contributes to America’s narrative plentitude by adding to our collective story lives we must see if we’re ever to satisfy those ghosts.

About Hiking with Nietzsche

Nietzsche wasn’t making positive claims about the nature of material reality, he was throwing down a gauntlet; and we have still not picked it up.

About Love Your Enemies

Mencken would probably have dismissed Brooks as a sentimentalist — “an evangelist,” in Mencken’s scornful term. A useful and welcome evangelist, I’d say.

About Before She Knew Him

Peter Swanson definitely knows how to write a page turner.

About I.M.

His critics often accused him of a kind of creative freneticism, but throughout “I.M.,” this designer’s innovation and confidence are evident, contrasting with an industry that, despite its superficial fickleness, can be deeply resistant to change.

About Unspeakable

Shawcross can certainly write – there are some lovely images in Unspeakable – and she is obviously in possession of a curious and interesting mind. But there is simply not enough for a book here – or not for this book, in this form.

About Contagion

Beyond the excellent use and skill with regards to tropes and tension, the other reason Contagion is so successful is because of its characters.

About The Gilded Wolves

This is a fantastic YA Fantasy novel with a rich background, an overarching fun plot that mixes puzzle solving, heists and revenge.

About The Kingdom of Copper

The Kingdom of Copper is pretty much all you could possibly wish for in a fantasy read. And you don’t even have to use up the limited supply in your special lamp.

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 Little Snake

What The Little Snake is about more than anything, though, is the acceptance of death as an ineluctable part of life. It’s not a new message, but Kennedy conveys it here in a manner that is subtle and hugely moving.

About Salt On Your Tongue

A hybrid of nature journal and motherhood memoir sounds cynically on-trend, but Salt never feels anything less than wholly authentic.

About The Kingdom of Copper

I am in awe of the world that Chakraborty has created, alongside our own human realm, and cannot wait to return to it in book three.
Absolutely recommended.

About Sadie

It took me this long to recover from the experience of reading the book all those months ago to be able to write about it coherently.

About In Our Mad and Furious City

His novel is weirdly somnolent given how portentously it primes us for danger, for the burning of mosques and blood in the streets.

About Ghost Trees

In Ghost Trees Gilbert rails gently against global warming and globalisation, and laments the decline of natural diversity and the loss of community that, he says, comes with it.