A “searing polemic” declared Anthony Clavane in the New Statesman of And the Sun Shines Now: How Hillsborough and the Premier League changed Britain, by Adrian Tempany. “As it is written by a Hillsborough survivor ... it carries enormous resonance.” For the Financial Times’s Peter Marshall, this is “the first substantial memoir from a survivor of Britain’s worst sporting disaster ... The argument that football has grown rich by taking the game from its traditional support is a familiar one. But seldom has it been so passionately lodged.” In the Observer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce also found it “a bold, important, honest, gripping, authoritative book that takes us to the dark heart of how Britain works”. Only Dominic Sandbrook, writing in the Sunday Times, levelled any serious criticism. “Few football supporters, I imagine, would seriously disagree with Tempany’s argument,” he wrote. “The problem, though, is that although his opening chapter makes extraordinarily powerful reading, there is something off-putting about his relentlessly strident tone. It is a bit like sitting next to a fan who starts shouting at the referee ... as soon as the players kick off and is still at it deep into injury time.”
There were raves all round for Golden Hill, the debut novel by Francis Spufford set in 18th-century New York. In the Evening Standard, Claire Harman praised the author’s “extraordinary visual imagination and brilliant pacing”, which allowed him to bring “his people and situations to life with glancing ease”. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Times, Spufford’s style “has a similar effect to snowfall: it too adds an extra sparkle to everything it touches ... For its payoff alone, Golden Hill deserves a big shiny gold star.” Under the headline “A Manhattan masterpiece” the Sunday Times’s Peter Kemp described the book as “a cunningly crafted narrative that, right up to its tour de force conclusion, is alive with tantalising twists and turns ... This is a dazzlingly written novel. Little brilliancies of metaphor and phrasing gleam everywhere.” But in the New Statesman, while Leo Robson agreed that “the teeming, cart-torn New York of Golden Hill is as real as it gets, a model of immersive prose” – he argued that “in other ways Spufford can appear crabbed ... in particular in his failure to replicate the perfection of 18th‑century plotting”.
It was a rather more mixed bag for Nina Stibbe’s second novel Paradise Lodge, a follow-up to the hugely successful memoir Love, Nina and the well-reviewed Man at the Helm. “This is not a novel in which epic events occur,” wrote Hannah Beckerman in the Observer. “There is an episodic structure to the narrative and one could go so far as to say that not much happens.” For Lucy Mangan, in the Telegraph, if the book “doesn’t quite reach the dizzy heights of Stibbe’s first two books, it is partly because we’ve been spoiled – they set the bar so high”. But beneath the humour in Paradise Lodge “lurks a convincing portrait of teenage vulnerability and brewing catastrophe. This cold undercurrent makes it harder to laugh at the frothy surface.” In the Standard, Katie Law felt the story “lacks oomph and would probably have worked better as a diary”, while in the Times, Melissa Katsoulis damned the book with faint praise. “The light, fluffy mood and cast of sweethearts will leave you grinning cheerily and dreaming of your own highbacked chair in the sunny sitting room of Paradise Lodge . A perfect read if you have flu or don’t like thinking.”
