Critics were near-unanimous in their praise for CE Morgan’s Baileys prize shortlisted second novel – about family, race and horse-racing in Kentucky – reaching for the phrase “the great American novel” as well as for horse-racing metaphors to justify their excitement. “The Sport of Kings is ambitious, and reading it often feels like riding a green racehorse – it’s spirited, fast and almost perfectly formed, but it is also skittish and throws you off a few times,” wrote Fiona Wilson in the Times. “No dead horse has been more thoroughly flogged than the Great American Novel, yet C E Morgan, undeterred, has coaxed the poor animal into unexpected resurrection,” agreed Duncan White in the Sunday Telegraph. “A high literary epic of America.” In the Financial Times, Edmund Gordon described it as “a panoramic view of race relations in America … a bleak and bitter inversion of the American dream [with prose] often ravishingly beautiful, displaying an unerring instinct for metaphor and music”. The Spectator’s Henry Jeffreys was a rare dissenter: “Horse-breeding functions as a metaphor for how things are passed down the generations … It’s a vivid analogy, but Morgan doesn’t half lay it on thick.” However, “For all its flaws, The Sport of Kings catches the spirit of modern America: violent, divided and profoundly pessimistic.”
Much more division greeted the politician Sayeeda Warsi, whose book The Enemy Within is about Muslims in Britain. A “withering polemic on the flaws in government rhetoric and policy on extremism and multiculturalism”, declared Afua Hirsch in the Observer, anticipating that some people “will criticise her denial that violent extremism has anything to do with Muslim ideology”. One such was the Evening Standard’s Maryam Namazie: “Her apologia for Islamism is shocking … Every Islamist agenda Warsi writes about, such as gender segregation, the veil or Sharia courts, is sanitised and trivialised, while almost every organisation or personality is either misunderstood, misrepresented or merely branded ‘controversial’.” In the Telegraph, Sameer Rahim called it “important” but “chaotically organised and repetitive … Despite these flaws, her book is vital reading.” In the Times, Douglas Murray took credit for the book’s title (it “comes from a piece I wrote about Warsi while she was in office”) while decrying its “rewriting of events”. “I cannot think of a recent book from a mainstream publisher that has been as replete with misrepresentation and misleading sleights of hand on almost every page,” he wrote.
Violinist Min Kym also divided critics with Gone, her story of the £1.2m, 300-year-old Stradivarius violin she loved and lost (to thieves at Euston station). “Airless” and “overheated”, decided Ivan Hewett, for the Telegraph. “Remarkable and original”, thought the Observer’s Barbara Ellen, who enjoyed learning about classical music. “Frustrating, intermittently fascinating” thought the Spectator’s Alexandra Coghlan, explaining that “while this is a book about music, about the life of a child prodigy, a violin found and lost, it’s as much a book about being a woman.” In the Mail on Sunday, violinist Clemency Burton-Hill called it a “suspenseful … devastating but ultimately redemptive read. It is much more than a story about a lost violin: it is about who we are, how we love, how we grieve. And ... about the power that music has to touch and transform lives.”
