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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Her wry, wary commentary has no right to be anything but gut-wrenchingly sad, yet her savage wit and chilling self-awareness transform even unspeakable misery into something howlingly funny.
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Jennifer Haigh
It is Hannah's voice -- wry, insightful, and often hilarious -- that animates this astonishing book.
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Outstanding
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Village Voice Jessica Winter
Kennedy's prose, a concentrate of acrid wit and sorrowful precision, is astonishing as always, achieving both a prehensile immediacy of sensory experience and a sidelong spiritual journey.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Katie Owen
What prevents [Kennedy's] work from being lowering is the exhilarating precision of her vinegary observation of people and places, and her anarchic sense of humour.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Ali Smith
Beautifully written, so lucid that it actually spikes its own attempts at realism, Paradise is a faultless performance of rhetorical nihilism.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Catherine Taylor
Kennedy has commented: "I don't hate the reader, but I do want to drag them into hell's mouth - it's good for them." With prose as rapturous as this, it's a place to be entered into willingly.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Carol Birch
A brave and uncompromising book that lingers in the mind, Paradise is AL Kennedy on top form.
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Outstanding
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Salon Laura Miller
A remarkably eloquent tale.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle David Kipen
Grim, sexy, beautifully written.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Carolyn See
Whatever else novels like this may accomplish, they reassure the desperately unhappy that they're not alone.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Kennedy's writing, slightly experimental in form here and there, is exceptionally strong: unsettled, tense, vibrant, humorous and intermittently guttermouthed too.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Sarah Saffian
Paradise can grow tedious as it careens between drunken tirade and cranky sobriety, but ultimately it achieves a swirling waking-dream state that's both jarring and richly satisfying.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Elizabeth Johnston
In an age where the idea of cosmetic perfection is honoured, Kennedy continues her priest-like task of honouring human imperfection, bathing it in the moving waters of her prose... It is not pretty. It is not easy. But it is real. [23 Oct 2004, p.D10]
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Claire Messud
And yet somehow, in spite of all these things – in spite of Hannah's whining, deceitful, self-absorbed and childish nature – Kennedy and her creation succeed in holding our attention, in making us care about Hannah's search for paradise.
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Favorable
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Booklist Carol Haggas
There's humor amid the horror of Hannah's dissolution, a sublime pathos balanced by a gritty realism, in which Kennedy continually astounds the reader with her language. [15 Dec 2004, p.690]
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Mixed
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Library Journal Jyna Scheeren
Although compelling at times, this book is ultimately someone else's long nightmare--the one you don't necessarily want to hear. [1 Feb 2005, p.68]
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Good writing essentially redeems a potentially self-defeating subject in the Scottish author's absorbing fourth: a first-person chronicle of alcoholism that's equal parts despairing, funny, and intermittently tiresome.
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Mixed
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London Review Of Books Thomas Jones
The miseries of Kennedy's fiction could make it unbearable, but it's redeemed not only by a surprising sense of humour, which encompasses a well-developed sense of the ridiculous, but also by a sense of perspective.
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Mixed
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The Spectator D.J. Taylor
Its distinguishing mark, as ever in Kennedy’s writing, is the precise exploitation of that uncomfortable space — uncomfortable because it leaves the reader with no room for manoeuvre — where the funny meets the horrible head on.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Michael Mewshaw
By turns funny and poignant, tender and annihilating, her prose has undeniable power, yet it sometimes appears to be at odds with her story and often undermines its verisimilitude.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Neil Gordon
Philosophically in error, creatively incomplete.
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