Zak Wood

An incredibly beautiful and painfully difficult read. Reflections on hope and freedom through the darkest lens, beyond my ability to comprehend that level of pain and then looking through it. Just an amazing book.

A beautiful beautiful translation

Genuinely mind bending, and terrifying, and hopeful. I saw many many parallels to South Africa, both in the risk escalation and in the management and mitigation.

Beautiful writing all the way through. Really just lovely.

Difficult one to review, because it's not a bad book, I just didn't quite land with it.

Plenty of fun elements - The narrator is a total prick, which is always fun; the pace is good; the writing is fine.

But that's the thing, I think - The book is fine. It's not bad, it's not good, it's just fine.

Intense. Gently intense.

It's definitely the weirdest of the Jonathon Fairfax novels - Starts to feel like they're jumping the shark. BUT, having said that, it's still laugh out loud funny much of the time, and the observations of Germany had me rolling.

This book makes me wish I'd rated other books lower, to show how good this one is. I am genuinely shocked at the overall rating. Or maybe it just connected with me. Either way, it is done, and I am empty.

One of the most difficult books I've ever read. Really well written, but brings home so strongly that these horrific situations exist just down the road, and still exist - It removes all possible levels of abstraction. Really balanced as well - Both in the fear that farmers live in, and the horrific un-human way that (these farmers) saw fellow human beings. It raises all sorts of very visceral challenges about the country we live in - Should really be mandatory reading for all of us.

The simplest and most honest review I can give is that when I finished reading it, I had to go sit very quietly for a while. Even knowing the story, knowing how it ends, knowing everything that was coming, I found myself bereft.

Chesterton's lovely gentle humour. Super way to spend a quiet hour.

My first McCarthy book, and I loved it.

Very fast and simple refresher on systems thinking. Well explained, easy to read, makes the topic very accessible with some real insights to boot.

As beautifully written as all of his stories. Deeply strange, and impactful. I struggled to finish the last hundred odd pages, simply because I didn't want the book to end, and there were many moments when I had to close it and just sit with the story and the words.

Great fun.

Simple language, but I found the storyline lacking.

Left me bereft. A genuinely beautiful book.

How the hell you write a whole book about one song I'll never understand, and then to make it incredibly interesting as well! Excellent book.