“Ware’s innovative graphic novel deepens and enriches the form by breaking it apart. Packaged in a large box like a board game, the project contains 14 ‘easily misplaced elements’ — pamphlets, books, foldout pages — that together follow the residents of a Chicago triplex (and one anthropomorphized bee) through their ordinary lives. In doing so, it tackles universal themes including art, sex, family and existential loneliness in a way that’s simultaneously playful and profound.”

The New York Times

“Luminescent . . . Illuminating and often funny but ultimately devastating . . . Breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Stockholm jury should pick up the phone now.”

The Financial Times

“Joan Wickersham’s graceful new story collection explores the failings and desires of seven different sets of people, all of whom share a sense of longing and a single title: The News from Spain. Each tableau fills a concentrated space with rich detail: the sickening smell of popcorn, crumpled tissues and crusted paintbrushes, a white breast in green water. Wickersham crafts intelligent and vivid narratives — the only two girls in an all-boys school build a delicate friendship; a bedridden wife takes comfort in brandy and her caretaker — but she is at her best in the realm of nuance, where a cardboard box gone unopened tells you everything you need to know. Human beings in a constant quest for kinship are nothing new. But in Wickersham’s hands, their journey feels entirely worth joining, even briefly, and the outcome is anything but certain.”

Mia Lipman (Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2012)

“He draws an extraordinarily tactile, Kodachrome-crisp picture of the Bay Area world that his characters inhabit — a world perched somewhere between the hipster concerns of old-school Berkeley and the more down-to-earth worries of middle- and lower class Oakland — while conjuring the music from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s that Archy and Nat love so much and that has given them their vocation. The result is a novel with the grooviest soundtrack since High Fidelity: the jazz, funk, soul, R&B and rock ’n’ roll that thumps through this volume is a Proustian madeleine for the characters in this book, linking their present lives to their adolescent passions, and the Berkeley of 2004 to the Oakland of the ’70s, when Huey Newton and the Black Panthers held sway. ”

Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)

“Smith’s piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest London, their lives disrupted by fateful choices and the brutal efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments, uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and searingly direct.”

The New York Times

“Gone Girl is this author’s third novel, after Sharp Objects and Dark Places. Dark Places, in particular, drew attention from mystery aficionados, but Gone Girl is Ms. Flynn’s dazzling breakthrough. It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they’re hard to part with — even if, as in Amy’s case, they are already departed.

And if you have any doubts about whether Ms. Flynn measures up to Patricia Highsmith’s level of discreet malice, go back and look at the small details. Whatever you raced past on a first reading will look completely different the second time around.”

Janet Maslin (The New York Times)