An interesting and readable look at the opportunities sport offers

OLYMPIC gold medalist Christine Ohuruogu has joined up with writer Paul May to write a fiction for readers aged nine upwards. It tells the tale of Maxine who is crazy about sport and thrilled to be going to Camp Gold. She makes good friends and cute boys and discovers her hidden talent of running.
Soon she is training for the Nationals and is watched by Olympic champions, but then as she prepares for a tough battle ahead, she becomes the victim of pranks and sabotage.

[My daughter] was hooked by the excitement and suspense of the story, and I think she just genuinely liked it because it was about sports and something quite ‘concrete’ – a nice change from some of the more abstract books she reads about magical realms, etc

And the writing. Oh wow, the writing. Not for nothing has Morrison been garlanded with a Novel Prize, Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award. There’s always a sense of grand occasion when Morrison releases a book, and with good reason: the journey is always vivid, dazzling and rich, each paragraph a mealy morsel in its own right. A highly personal and affecting tale that manages to be deftly political, God Help the Child is emotionally rousing and gut-wrenching

A piece of mastery ... Sensitive to legacies of abuse, to pressures of racism, image, taboo and economics, and to the harmful fictions and common social madnesses of the modern Western world, it found an impossible-seeming, myth-like form to reveal the interconnections between these, never losing its streetwise footing in the process.

There is much to be admired: perspective, luminous language, and courage in confronting the difficulty of the big subject

A complex novel… It comes off beautifully, like a Picasso painting telling a story in a multi-dimensional series of superimposed snapshots as each character becomes ever more rounded and complete

True to style, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning Morrison uses simple yet poetic prose as she tackles timely issues in a timeless way

Gripping

Raw and uncompromising… Moving but not for the faint-hearted

A realistic, beautifully written novel

Morrison excels at bringing uncomfortable topics to the fore, weaving themes of family and the importance of how we treat our children together in an incredibly evocative, poignant and winning novel

The language, shifts in points of view and the audacity of the novel’s premise are overwhelming. Morrison remains an incredibly powerful writer who commands attention no matter the story she is telling

The themes here can be brutal…but the voices and fierce emotions will win your heart. Seductive or raging, bewildered or heartbroken, they are all, in the end hopeful

[Morrison’s] brilliant work continues

It is a testament to Morrison’s excellence as a writer that a book that is largely focused on the abuse of children is such compulsive reading

A compelling, and oddly uplifting, read

Intricate and inventive

What a privilege and pleasure it is to read… The book hooked me from the first chapter… I recommend this book, as I would all the others by this author.

The tale of men struggling to survive in a brutal landscape is told in language so sparse that whole passages are made up of monosyllabic vocabulary that is powerfully immersive. You can only guess at the influence Williams may have had on Cormac McCarthy

Williams is a versatile writer: the story of Will Andrews couldn't be more different to the tale of William Stoner – and his depiction of the behaviour of men in extreme situations is masterful

A meditative cowboy yarn with a putative ecological message, it could not be more different from Williams’s [Stoner]; it is just as good

It is a sort of Dances with Buffaloes, and one of the most tense, gripping, tragic novels I have ever read

Stoner...is a fine book but his western novel Butcher's Crossing is even better... Visceral, violent and chilling.

A novel that turns upside down the expectations of the genre—and goes to war with a century of American triumphalism, a century of regeneration through violence, a century of senseless slaughter.