Editorial reviews

See How Small is a brutal, necessary and near perfect novel.

“Outline,” which reflects details from the author’s life as well as the narrator’s fascination with autobiography, renders everyday encounters in precise, almost anthropological detail.

For all Mr. Carey’s formidable powers and the righteous fire he means to light here, “Amnesia” isn’t one of his most memorable efforts.

The Rabbit Back Literature Society is a voyeuristic literary mystery with bits of Blue Velvet and shades of The Shadow of the Wind, and it would not be a better book if it were sweeter or more straightforward.

The story itself is a compelling and entertaining read, but it doesn’t linger past the final page.

Glow is ultimately a story about rhythms, and people who live outside them—the revolutionaries and corporate powers scheming beyond legal means, drug users seeing the world through skewed perspectives, insomniacs whose nocturnal lives set them apart.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is most definitely a challenging novel.

A finely wrought if somewhat melancholy first novel.

Much dribbling punctuated by a few slam dunks.

Has some Twin Peaks moments even if it tries a little too hard. Still, read with all the lights on!

It’s one of those rare books that trusts its readers far more than it should, allowing them to piece together clues and suggestions without providing easy answers.

Uncle Janice is more of a character study than a work of crime fiction, but has enough elements of both to attract readers willing to cross genre borders.

It was still a jarring departure which left me wishing for more of the sucker's tale told so well at the start.

He may not have the consistency and sophistication of Franzen, but The Winter War remains an intelligent debut.

The first half of “The Secret Wisdom of the Earth” moves with the leisurely pace of summer, but the second half is a page turner featuring masculine challenges, bloodshed and stoic survival.

It’s warm. It has a heartbeat and a pulse. This is a book that is painfully alive.

Reading The First Bad Man, you are reminded that the minute and the magnificent are both real life, that the daily texture of things is as varied, intricate and fascinating as the great ruptures of human life, as tidal waves and revolutions and thwarted love.

For readers to be able to resonate with Olivia and Sam, there should've been more of a focus on telling a compelling story than on how the story was told.