Cressida Connolly
Closing Time
Autumn is surely the first novel about Brexit, but don’t let that put you off. It’s also a wonderful celebration of friendship, art and everything that matters: loyalty, kindness, the beauty of nature and the lifelong solace of reading. It’s a book that could be claimed by any number of interested parties, from gerontophiles to feminist art historians to civil liberties groups to fans of daytime television’s Bargain Hunt. Jews, refugees, lesbians, the disenfranchised middle-aged, the lonely and the forgotten could all find cause to think the book is about them. I myself propose that the real subject of Autumn is the inestimable value of storytelling; but then I’m a novelist, so I would. This really can be all things to all men.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties