The trickiness of marketing: Benjamin Judge reviews Too Many Magpies

Tell you what, marketing is the trickiest of things. I've had a lovely review from Benjamin Judge for Too Many Magpies, but he begins by saying that something - the marketing blurb, maybe ME? (!) or at least what I said about the book - had put him right off it and made him actually TUNE OUT when I read last October for Manchester Literature Festival. However (thank goodness), he put aside his impressions and read it recently.

I'm very grateful to him for doing so, and extremely pleased with his final judgement:

It is superbly written. Spare, while being full of perfectly observed detail, the text has a knack of repeatedly picking up moments of life that only while reading you realise you haven’t seen in a novel before but that are true and needed telling. The book freezes our times for future generations in a way that the mammoth, multi-layered uber-novels of Franzens, Safran Foers and Mitchells can only dream of. If I say it is light I don’t mean lightweight but that it is graceful, illuminating and capable of flight. Like the magpies of its title it can soar beautifully and cackle maliciously. It is a great book.