Books in the Media: 'American master' Percival Everett makes an impression

This week Percival Everett received praise across the nationals while in non-fiction critics turned to books on the climate crisis and a new memoir about AIDS and the internet. 

Everett’s reworking of Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his latest novel James (Mantle) “gives every appearance of being the book that seals his legacy”, wrote the Sunday Times’ Johanna-Thomas Corr. Everett’s version, narrated by Twain’s escaped slave Jim, here named James, has “the potential to become a classic text, one that conveys in the most compelling voice the absolute stupidity of slavery”, concluded Thomas-Corr. Arin Keeble at the Financial Times also reviewed James: “This is the work of an American master at the peak of his powers.” In the Guardian, Anthony Cummins called Everett’s novel “gripping, painful, funny, [and] horrifying," saying: "This is multi-level entertainment, a consummate performance to the last.” Jessa Crispin’s review in the Telegraph concluded: “Everett has long been the overlooked genius of American letters, writing work that’s too tough, too smart and too exact for widespread admiration. But now, by wrestling so well with one of the literary angels, he demands to be recognised.”  

Writing for the Observer, Ellen Peirson-Hagger commended Sinéad Gleeson’s debut novel Hagstone (Fourth Estate) which follows Nell, an artist living alone on the island off the west coast of Ireland. Peirson-Hagger noted: “In Hagstone [Gleeson] distils thought-provoking ideas about art, solitude and the supernatural into short, crisp sentences. This simplicity makes her occasional use of poetic image... all the more sublime.”  

The Times’ Ben Cooke commended journalist and former neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern’s The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes our Minds, Brains and Bodies (Penguin), which argues that the climate crisis “is already subtly constraining our ability to lead mindful, happy lives”. Cooke continued: “Aldern has managed to do something that most books about climate change fail to: cast the problem in a new light, revealing it to be more insidious than it first appeared."  

Heather McCalden’s memoir The Observable Universe (Fitzcarraldo) is “so surprising that... [it] feels revelatory”, wrote the New Statesman’s Peirson-Hagger. McCalden “traces the evolution of AIDS – from which both her parents died when she was a child – alongside the development of the internet” and, Peirson-Hagger wrote, reaches the conclusion that “what matters is grappling with how we live now, with contagion and loss in the digital age”.  

The Financial Times’ Sheena Joughin praised The Axeman’s Carnival (Europa), the new novel from Catherine Chidgey, as “delightful and compelling”. The story’s narrator – a magpie named Tama – informs “part of the [book’s] pleasure”. Joughin concluded: “Like many a satisfying narrator, Tama doesn’t know quite where he belongs, who to trust, or what he can risk. But every word sings true.”