Books in the Media: Madeline Cash declared an 'energising' new voice
This week, a debut, two crime novels and a biography of a former UK prime minister made it into the critics’ top picks.
Madeline Cash’s “morbidly funny” debut novel, Lost Lambs (Doubleday) about the “seemingly nuclear but actually highly dysfunctional Flynn family” was reviewed by Roisin Kelly at the Sunday Times. “At times, turning the pages of Lost Lambs is like watching an episode of The Simpsons, with the town’s absurdist annual events like ‘Knitting for Narcolepsy’ and a ‘three-legged race for three-legged dogs,’” she wrote. Ultimately, Cash’s “intelligent, funny writing… manages to capture something we can all universally relate to: how normal it is to have a dysfunctional family”. Writing for the Guardian, Lara Feigel described Lost Lambs as a “witty, quickfire book”, concluding: “Cash’s virtuosic wit allows her to warm hearts at the same time as satirising the world… Cash is a happy and energising new voice.” The Bookseller’s Madeleine Feeny called the novel a “dynamite debut” that “takes a magnifying class to the disintegration of the American dream”.
Witch Trial (Wildfire), the latest from former criminal barrister and The Traitors contestant Harriet Tyce, was included in Barry Forshaw’s round-up of crime novels for the Financial Times. The story “might be her most intriguing read yet”, he declared. Tyce’s latest follows heart surgeon Matthew who is on the jury when two girls “are accused of causing the death of a fellow pupil in an Edinburgh park”. Forshaw concluded: “Characterisation (notably of the conflicted Matthew and the accused girls) is nonpareil, as is the impeccable plotting.”
MK Oliver’s A Sociopath’s Guide to Successful Marriage (Hemlock) was also included in Forshaw’s round-up. Oliver’s tale of a housewife trying to dispose of a body while attempting to get her daughter into a good school is “a blackly comic delight” that is “sharply sardonic and unputdownable”. The Times’s John Dugdale called it a “scintillating debut”, adding: “It’s really a sardonic social comedy cunningly disguised as a psychological thriller.”
A new biography of the former prime minister Gordon Brown, entitled Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose (Bloomsbury) by political journalist James Macintyre, was reviewed by Nicola Sturgeon, writing for the Observer. “The timing of James Macintyre’s biography of Gordon Brown ensures that some paragraphs will cause sharp intakes of breath,” the review begins. These paragraphs relate to the relationship between Peter Mandelson, newly implicated in the Epstein files, and Brown. Although an “interesting biography”, it sometimes reads more “an account of the New Labour project and the rupture with Tony Blair as it is a portrait of Gordon Brown himself”, wrote Sturgeon.
The Telegraph’s Philip Johnston called the biography a “revisionist book in that Macintyre feels Brown has had a raw deal and is ‘more than due a reappraisal’”. He noted that Brown’s “twin moral beacons” – individual freedom and caring for others – “would guide him throughout his political career, and are well documented by Macintyre”. In the Guardian, Gordon Brown was crowned the book of the day and described by Jonathan Freedland as an “illuminating new biography”. He concluded: “This diligent book seeks to… tell the story of a life packed with drama, tragedy and, above all, service.”
