Critics were drawn to the scatalogical themes in Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, which examines the latest thinking about “good” and “bad” bacteria and finds that it’s really much more complicated than that. “This is not a book for the squeamish,” wrote Michael Prodger in the Times, but “overcome one’s distaste for some of the investigations ... and the reasons for Yong’s proselytising enthusiasm become clear… [we] should end up with a new respect for the previously disdained organisms and hopefully go a little easier with the antiseptics.” In the Daily Telegraph, Steven Poole’s eyes did “occasionally glaze over in the parade of bugs, but, in the main, Yong’s book is vividly enjoyable [and] strangely comforting.” Fellow pathology school graduate Kate Womersley, in the Spectator, decided that the book “makes the importance of popularising science (a dirty word in some circles) sparklingly clear … From his vibrant introduction to the witty endnotes, Yong’s expertise and narration hold no less wonder than a sacred text ... Yong’s prose is alive with an almost incredulous pleasure that the field he has loved since childhood is now in vogue.” For Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, the main takeaway was: “on the whole, don’t bet your gut on yoghurt.”
In Shrinking Violets, Joe Moran tackles a far more embarrassing subject: being shy. Critics, many of whom confessed to being secretly shy themselves, embraced it. “Fantastic and involving,” wrote Rachel Cooke in the Observer. “A wonderful, witty writer,” concluded the Daily Mail’s Marcus Berkmann. “To a shy person, this book is incredibly cheering.” But in the Times, Melanie Reid found that the book “lacks in ambition. It is a fascinating subject, but it’s so huge that avenues inevitably remain unexplored. I would have enjoyed fewer shy celebrities and more on how ordinary people experience shyness.” Helen Davies in the Sunday Times found “The chapter on the vanishing female singer-songwriters of the 1960s [to be] a hobby chapter too far ... Far more fun is the advice provided by Michael Argyle, an Oxford psychologist evangelical in his war on shyness, who concluded that a session of Scottish country dancing once a week was a universal cure.”
Writing shy characters is notoriously tricky, but the award-winning Eimear McBride specialises in damaged ones, such as the young, Irish-girl-in-London narrator of The Lesser Bohemians, her followup to A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. “McBride’s eagerly anticipated second novel … is also about that stormy passage from girlhood to womanhood and it is also deeply shadowed by abuse in childhood,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times. “The same ferocity is here and at times the same darkness. But in The Lesser Bohemians the voyage from innocence to experience is ultimately more hopeful.” In the New Statesman, Hannah Rosefield admired the language: “full of compressions and inversions, nouns made into verbs and well-worn phrases torn apart … If you rush McBride’s sentences, you’ll trip ... this extraordinary novel deserves all the success of McBride’s first.” But the Independent’s Max Liu was frustrated: “I cannot recall having such diametrically opposed feelings about the different parts of one novel,” he wrote, concluding that the monologue of one character, Stephen, is “an interesting idea that’s handled clumsily”.
