The Cauliflower, the latest novel by Nicola Barker, was greeted with a combination of enthusiasm and bafflement. A riff on the life of the Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna, the book is, wrote Jan Dalley in the Financial Times, an “apparently random assemblage of bits and pieces”, including haikus, jokes and recipes. “This is an extremely ambitious book, playful, maddening, over-long, thought-provoking and rich.” In the Spectator, Justin Cartwright praised Barker as “both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless”, but confessed that “for some time I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was”. He advised readers to skip to Barker’s afterword first, to spare confusion, and concluded: “I don’t think Barker has quite pulled this one off.” Melissa Katsoulis, writing in the Times, had no time for the book’s “pointless meta-moments and tedious look-no-hands haikus. This clever experiment would be a beautiful story if the author hadn’t stolen the limelight from her subject.” In the Sunday Times, however, Edmund Gordon was full of praise: “readers who require a linear plot to hold their attention might not get much out of the novel, but it does somehow cohere into a complex, satisfying whole.”
“All That Man Is, David Szalay’s fourth novel, confirms that he is not one of the great prose stylists of his generation,” wrote Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times. “The problems are overwriting; too much weak weather imagery, pretentious syntax, clumsy rhythms, a fondness for compound adjectives, overkill on the adverbs.” But even with these reservations she found the book to be “a triumph ... a 100-megawatt novel: intelligent, intricate, so very well made, the form perfectly fitting the content.” In the Spectator, Jude Cook was almost as enthusiastic. “Nobody captures the super-sadness of modern Europe as well as Szalay … he emerges as a writer with a voice unlike any other.” Chris Power, writing in the New Statesman, argued that, “if you think your shelves don’t need another volume dealing with the tribulations of the white and mostly wealthy western European male, you probably haven’t read Szalay before … this is a book that I was impatient to return to and regretted finishing.”
This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World by Jerry Brotton was praised by Dan Jones in the Sunday Times as “a colourful narrative of that extraordinary time and a reminder that our own fortunes and those of the wider Islamic world have been intertwined for much longer than we might think”. Brotton excels, he wrote, in “his exploration of the ways that English dalliances in the Islamic world filtered into Elizabethan popular culture during the 1590s. He has no shortage of eminent examples.” However in the Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Seal criticised the book for an “over-reliance on the contemporary dramas of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare and other playwrights to explain the ‘allure and horror’ that the Islamic world had for the Elizabethans … The problem is that the protracted textual analysis is embedded in indigestible chunks, which are a drag on the book’s lively pace.” In the Times, Kate Maltby found it to be “a vivid, significant work of scholarship,” which “reads Elizabethan playwrights with a sharp eye and a dry sense of Tudor irony. It’s a shame we have to slog through some of the denser trade negotiations of the 1570s.”
