Reviewers were largely charmed by The Story of Alice, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s book anticipating the 150th anniversary later this year of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Sifting facts for meaning in fine-tuned words, this is biography at its best,” applauded the New Statesman’s Lyndall Gordon, who found the author an admirable “guide who won’t rush to judgment” with a “flair for play of language”. AS Byatt agreed in the Spectator, extolling Douglas-Fairhurst as “a startling and exciting writer” who is “a subtle expert in doubleness” – Charles Dodgson and Lewis Carroll, the real and fictive Alice – and “splendidly interesting about the world in which the Alice books were written”. Slightly less excited and startled was the political pundit Philip Collins, a curious choice as the Times’s reviewer, who mixed praise with a complaint about “endless literary contextualising”; his reservations were not shared by the Independent’s Amanda Craig – who deemed it “no less fascinating, incisive, elegantly written and insightful” than Douglas-Fairhurst’s study of Dickens – or by the FT’s AN Wilson, for whom the book confirmed its author’s “brilliance as a literary biographer”.
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs, wrote the Sunday Times’s Bryan Appleyard, is an Apple-endorsed “corrective” to the depiction of him by Walter Isaacson as always “part genius, part jerk”, with the new biography contending that in his second stint at Apple he was “Steve 2.0, a renewed and rebooted man ... with much more empathy”. While Appleyard refrained from judgment, as did the Independent’s Bonnie Greer, other reviewers had no such inhibitions. In the Financial Times, Tim Bradshaw saw the way the authors refer to Jobs “as ‘Steve’ throughout but call everyone else by their last name” as reflecting an approach “too protective of their subject”. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin saw the book as weak on “anything beyond business”, and “too spotty to be a good introduction to Jobs lore”. In the Times, Hugo Rifkind lamented “the authors’ tendency to gush” in pronouncing Becoming Steve Jobs “a joy” for “the true geek” (“perfectly, it charts the lineage from one Apple product to the next), but limited by being “a portrait of Jobs” painted by two tech journalists: “They think it is all about the technology, with some other weird stuff tacked on. [But] if it wasn’t for the weird stuff – [Jobs’s] godawful baby-boomer guff, the meditation, the endless urge to feel like a rock star – the whole story would be quite different”.
Sarah Hall’s fifth novel already looks a shoo-in for (at least) the Man Booker prize longlist, judging by its reception so far. “I imagine that The Wolf Border – stylish, intelligent and a cracking read – will mark the point at which she stops being promising and becomes something of a star,” wrote the Sunday Times’s Theo Tait, who found a “not right” ending the only flaw in an “excellent, engrossing novel”. In the Mail on Sunday, Simon Humphreys praised it as “beautiful and quite stunning”, singling out Hall’s “poet’s eye” and “thrilling descriptions” of wolves and the Cumbrian landscape; and the Independent’s James Kidd similarly praised “this lyrical, beautiful and curiously uplifting novel about body politics and the body politics”, which has a “gripping” plot and “weighs sense and sensuality, order and chaos, with sumptuous grace”.
