Peter Conrad reviews Peter Carey's Wrong About Japan in the "Guardian", and isn't too impressed with it as he calls it a "disengaged feat of thumb-twiddling".
In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare is reviewed by Penny Green in the "Guardian", who finds that "Tasmania is an enigmatic place and Shakespeare captures it with an appreciative eye".
Boyd Tonkin in "The Independent" says: "It's hard to think of a more fiercely imagined novel about a place in recent years than Michelle de Krester's The Hamilton Case".
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is getting a lot of attention around the world, and this week Carole Burns reviews the book in "The Washington Post". Her verdict: "Roberts's writing is never understated. He sounds sometimes like Raymond Chandler, with that noir mix of toughness, sentiment and bravado. This style threatens to tip over into the overwrought, and sometimes it does." But for a first-time novelist he doesn't seem to have done too badly.
DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little (which is rising up the to-be-finished pile) gets a somewhat belated review by "The Yale Review of Books". I mean the book came out almost two years ago and won one of the major book awards. Did it really need to take that long to find that the book is "like nothing more than watching the most simplistic of TV-movies: a stereotypical, sensational, and self-congratulatory caricature geared towards triggering the right snickers at the right times."
