Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt.

- This is pure populist American garbage. I read the first 100 pages and then threw it at the wall. It was absurd and intensely annoying, full of cliches and stereotypes that would make Trump proud - 'Mexico bad, the US good'.

- What is surprising is the accolades it has received from much revered writers like Ann Patchett ('I couldn't put it down. I'll never stop thinking about it'), Don Winslow ('A Grapes of Wrath for our times'), Tracy Chevalier ('Essential reading'), and many others.

- It's TexMex fodder, not real Mexican food. It's Starbucks, not Melbourne cafe quality. And it's a typical John Grisham-style chase novel, thrillers of the dullest, plotless, sort.

- The opening pages give the game away immediately. The extended family of the main characters, the mother and her son, are massacred by one of the vicious drug running cartels who've taken over Apapulco. 

- This really is populist nonsense, and it's littered with silliness. Just one example: Luca, the son, (the feminine version of Lucas, by the way), is a seven year old ‘genius’ whose first words as a toddler were 'Let's read that once again Mami, except this time let's make it a more agreeable ending'!

- There's currently a raging debate about this book being a perfect example of cultural appropriation. And it is, but in a base unsophisticated way. The author barely tries to give her characters realistic Mexican identities, however much 'research' she claims to have done. If that was her intention she's failed dismally. She's just written a populist action novel. There's no depth or sophistication here. 

- (Read these excellent reviews: David Bowles in Medium, David Schmidt’s piece in The Blue Nib, and Myriam Gurba's brilliant piece in Tropics of Meta).

J.P. Pomare, In the Clearing

- In country Victoria in the 1980s Australian cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne stole blond, blue-eyed children and 'raised' them to prepare them for the new world she intended to deliver.

- This novel uses that historical reality as its fictional setting. The insidious evil of this cult was the cruelty its delusions visited upon the innocent, and its aftermath.

- Pomare captures the emotional and psychological damage the children suffered and that followed them through adult life, years after their release. He has written a very well constructed, pacy thriller, with plenty of jolts, surprises and twists along the way.

- It's hard to put down, holding your interest right to the delicious end.

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing.

- This is a wonderful holiday read, with delightful characters and plenty of 'rural noir'. There's provincial ignorance and prejudice in spades, but also love, loyalty and friendship.

- Set in coastal North Carolina in the 1950's and 60's there's no shortage of racism, sexism and middle class white privilege. 

- It's a coming-of-age novel, but a mature one. People are either good or bad, but the bad ones are ugly in the extreme. The domestic violence and rape episodes are raw and upsetting. 

- The book is exceptionally well written and paced, the final chapters covering the murder trial in particular. 

- And the twist at the end is very satisfying indeed. No wonder this novel has been a global best seller.

Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

- A brilliant novel, truly a masterpiece. But few people, excluding most Booker Award judges I suspect, would have persevered and read all of it. It’s a challenge. But goddamn it, it just sucks you in and I got thoroughly immersed in it.  

- The principal, unnamed, character tells the story of her own life and times (‘this monologue in my head’). She’s now in her mid-40s and has had a sad, frustrated, ordinary, happy, satisfying, insecure, guilt-ridden, productive life as a child, a sister, a wife, a small business owner, and a parent. She misses her own mother terribly, and had a difficult relationship with her father. She’s not crude or vulgar in any way. She’s intelligent, aware, caring, angry, over-sensitive, anxiety-riddled, hardworking. Her husband Leo, who calls her a ‘domestic engineer’, absolutely adores her. She’s also a cancer survivor. And, importantly, she’s an absolute delight to spend so much time with. (It took me three weeks to read this 1040 page brick). She has to be one of the greatest female characters in American literature. She restored my faith in America. 

- Fundamentally the major narrative thread weaving this incredibly rich tapestry together is the story of a family - parents, grandparents, marriage breakdowns, kids, step kids - and the deep emotions permeating it all. Particularly in being a mother.

- Her four kids (Stacy, Ben, Gillian, Jake); her loving husband Leo; her garden; her pets; her chickens; her favourite movies and TV shows; the countless words she hates (especially those starting with ‘ex’ if they also have a ‘u’ sound, like extrude, exude, excommunicate); people she hates, eg Trump; Pence; old household objects; lines from songs; constant riffs on all sorts of things; home cooking traditions; random bits and pieces of ordinary domestic lives. She’s ‘wallowing in domesticity’. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about plants, food additives, birds, all sorts of natural world minutia. She’s a Jane Austin fan - the books and movies, and reads Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates. She has a brilliant and formidable mind, always on show, and is very politically, socially and environmentally aware. In fact she’s a linguistic genius, utterly obsessive and verging on outright crazy. (And, not surprisingly, she rarely ventures onto social media). 

- The expression 'the fact that’ appears every three or four lines and acts like a full stop. It breaks up the statements and rants. You get used to it and it doesn’t annoy after 30 or so pages in. 

- Ellmann, through her character, celebrates American folklore, history, geography, literature, music, film, and popular culture generally. There are constant references, all informed and often cheeky. Abbreviations litter the text, and are spelt out in the Glossary. Eg POTUS doesn’t stand for President of the United States but for Purveyor of Totally Unprecedented Sleaze!

- She has a fascination with words that rhyme, suggest, resonate, and sound quirky, that just enter her head as she thinks. And she loves comprehensive lists - American desserts, meals, pies, drinks, food chemicals, fish dishes, sandwiches, creeks, islands and more. She’s got a thing about male gynaecologists. Why are they even allowed? 

- This is America in all its dimensions. And an honest, frequently savage critique - of racism, provincialism, Indian massacres, environmental destruction, contaminated water, corporate malfeasance, Fox News, Open Carry guys, school shootings, gun laws, paranoid police. She is a voice from the deep psyche of America. A voice of reason.

- Every once in a while there are two pages about a lioness and her cubs. Standard punctuation applies. They are sentenced and paragraphed (91-93) in the third person voice. The mother is protecting and rearing her cubs, so very natural. A major focus of this novel is motherhood. But when the lion is spotted by townsfolk fear breaks out among the population as if it’s a migrant or terrorist invasion. 

- Why have so many reviewers of this book called it funny, as if that’s it main feature? ‘Hilarious, eye-wateringly funny’ (Scotsman); ‘Hilarious’ (Bookmunch). (God, I hate that word hilarious, and I bet Ellmann does too.) These reviews are shallow. Even the blurb on the back cover says ‘...unforgivably funny’. Sure, it is often funny, and a constant comic tic is the clarified subject reference, eg ‘... and I’d try to draw them on top of the cake, the toys, not the moms’. (Ellmann indulges in this device far too much, at least once on every page, and it becomes tedious in the extreme). But comedy is not the book’s dominant feature, and it does a profound disservice to it to be described in this way. 

-(The original publisher of this huge tome, Galley Beggar Press Limited in the UK, deserves profound respect, and not just for publishing it. There is not one proofreading error in the whole 1000 page book. But editorially, the half dozen references to ‘koala bears’ are unfortunate (KOALAS ARE NOT BEARS. THEY ARE MARSUPIALS).