Linda Grant's We Had It So Good, Patrick French's India and Adam Mars-Jones's Cedilla
Linda Grant has "an effortless style ? no metaphor ever feels forced ? and her many ideas linger with you long after you have finished reading. The novel is pleasingly unpredictable too ? I never once foresaw a plot development. My only complaint? I fear I may not read a better book all year." Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard was delighted with Grant's novel about the babyboomer generation We Had It So Good. Melissa Katsoulis in the Times was similarly extravagant in her praise: "This is a gripping family saga stylishly told. Postwar California, Oxford and London are re-created superbly and brightly. Yet big ideas surface continually and make this much more than a readable trip down one man's life path . . . Grant approaches these questions with her usual insight and subtlety and comes close to creating the perfect novel." Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph was less convinced, wondering how interested younger readers would be, and remarking: "Her delineation of character is judicious rather than passionate ? so that even characters in extremis live out their dramas at a safe distance from the reader's heart."
Patrick French's India: A Portrait was well received, Neel Mukherjee in the Times noting its "immediacy, freshness and immense readability": "French, acutely conscious of the cliches and stereotypes that have marred writing about India, seeks to steer clear of them programmatically . . . It is a funny, witty book; also dense, gripping, thrilling. What blazes through each page is French's absolute and uncondescending engagement with India". Basharat Peer in the Daily Telegraph offered a quieter commendation, calling the book "impressive" and singling out the discussion of the billionaire businessman Sunil Bharti Mittal. In the Independent, Salil Tripathi highlighted French's statistical analysis of India's parliament, "a fascinating analysis, revealing a deeper truth . . . French's portrait is confusing for the reader in a hurry who wants a primer on India for his first flight to Delhi. But accept India's confusing complexities, and it is stirringly accurate."
Many of the reviewers of Adam Mars-Jones's novel Cedilla, the follow-up to Pilcrow, which recounts the next stage in the life of his gay, disabled protagonist John Cromer, remarked on its size. Yet it didn't put them off. Mark Sanderson in the Sunday Telegraph described "a cavalcade of incident ? both internal and external ? that rivals Proust in its intensity of detail . . . Has the punning prima donna got his comeuppance? It is a tribute to Mars-Jones's style, wit and humour that the exhausted yet exhilarated reader can't wait to find out." For an admiring Leo Robson in the Daily Telegraph, "There isn't a passage here that doesn't sparkle with some well-phrased perception, neatly overturned clich� or freshly minted pun. And while it can be draining to read a book of this size in which most sentences prompt you to smile, laugh or revise an opinion, you couldn't exactly call this a weakness." "I wasn't wild about Pilcrow," wrote Keith Miller in the Literary Review, "though I was hugely impressed by it. Cedilla is, in one sense, simply more of the same: same character, same voice (sensuous but unsentimental and morbidly quip-heavy) . . . same triangulations between author, grown-up narrator and youthful protagonist. If I enjoyed Cedilla more it is perhaps because that triad is sturdier this time round."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/22/critical-eye-book-reviews-roundup
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