Results for 'jon mcgregor'

1. Ali Smith

Glyph

Glyph’s primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference . . . Smith’s tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with . . . bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity . . . It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away. There is also something about Smith’s relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task . . . Smith’s sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable

1. Ali Smith

Gliff

Here is a voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear . . . Smith is good at fable-ising, and at taking a young perspective in order to question afresh systems and inherited knowledge . . . Smith’s fiction teaches with vitality that there is no such thing as a futile question

1. Ferdia Lennon

Glorious Exploits

One of the most original and brilliant Irish debuts in years

1. Rupert Dastur

Cloudless

Deeply moving ... Set on a hill farm in north Wales, the cycles of the natural world are rendered with the same power and exactitude as the human dramas of love and loss which exist alongside them. Beautiful and unflinching, Cloudless is a phenomenal debut.

1. Ali Smith

Glyph

Glyph’s primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference . . . Smith’s tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with . . . bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity . . . It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away. There is also something about Smith’s relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task . . . Smith’s sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable

1. Imogen Binnie
2. Aniefiok Ekpoudom
3. Yara Rodrigues Fowler

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