Issyvoo

Books The Lifeboat

Charlotte Rogan is not unfriendly to cliché, but at her best she writes her way through hackneyed and archetypal situations with such conviction that she refreshes them and gives them the power of myth.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban The New York Review of Books 2012
The Lifeboat is both an enthralling story of survival at sea and a novel that is satisfyingly concerned with the character of its own storytelling… the book is an ambiguous document, at once self-exculpatory and incriminating, and this page-by-page doubleness forces the reader to weigh Grace’s words with unusual care and caution.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban New York Review of Books 2012

Rogan writes viscerally about the desperate condition of the castaway, of what it is like to be “surrounded on four sides by walls of black water” or to be so thirsty your tongue swells to the size of “a dried and hairless mouse.”

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The New York Times Sarah Towers The New York Times 2012
Occasionally, this intense microcosm of the world springs a leak, metaphorically as well as literally, and wider realities rush in…

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Independent James Kidd The Independent 2012