"Just as Connors was renowned for having a short fuse on court, so he doesn't hold back in his autobiography. Never before have I read a book frothing with so much fury." John Preston in the Daily Mail was taken aback by Jimmy Connors's autobiography, The Outsider. "Here's a man who seems to have fallen out with practically everyone he ever met … however unlikable Connors may be, he has one big attribute as a writer: he's eye-poppingly indiscreet. As a result, The Outsider makes most sports autobiographies feel like very tepid affairs in comparison." Given this, it's quite difficult to see how Julian Hall in the Independent could call the book "a conversational and occasionally coy memoir". Peter Lattman in the New York Times noted that Connors was "perhaps the most important tennis player of the second half of the 20th century. A brash, hyperintense kid from the blue-collar East St Louis, Ill, area", he "led the charge in wresting the sport from its genteel, country club past". But he "was also kind of a jerk, and there is little in The Outsider to dispel his reputation as a narcissistic, selfish loner". Perhaps most important, his "recountings of epic rivalries with Björn Borg and McEnroe shed few new insights".
"Readers of contemporary British fiction will be forgiven for emitting a weary sigh when they open a new book and find themselves in yet another 1970s housing estate seen through the eyes of a whimsical, outsider kid. The orange squash, the Wimpys, the feather-cut mums. And so begins Perfect, Rachel Joyce's follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry." Melissa Katsoulis in the Times found the novel hard going at first: Perfect … has no laughs and only fleeting glimpses of nourishing human connectedness … But persevere and plough on … the reward is a redemptive ending of such tenderness that after 300-odd pages of darkness you will end up grinning dippily and recommending this wild, searching book to everyone you know." Elena Seymenliyska gave the book four out of five stars in the Telegraph, arguing: "Joyce has been criticised for being sentimental; if only more novels were bad enough to move us like this one."
A waspish Krissi Murison in the Sunday Times described Nicholas Lezard's Bitter Experience Has Taught Me: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury, a collection of his New Statesman columns, as "a sort of Bridget Jones for the middle-aged, freshly divorced, tenuously employed and borderline-alcoholic male literary critic". The "initial problem with Lezard's diary of despair and degeneracy" is that "it just isn't very desperate. He can dispute it all he likes, but he actually seems rather chuffed with his reincarnation as an overgrown teenager. Which is a great result for him, but dire news for the rest of us, who have to listen to him wittering on about it … he loves nothing more than to wax lyrical with extraordinarily inane observations on, for example, Paris (it's expensive); Christmas decorations (they go up too early) … rail replacement bus services (bit of a drag); Alan Sugar (what a bastard)." But for Jane Shilling in the Standard, "Lezard is a master of the comic vignette even (or especially) when consumed with self-pity … his elegant excursion into the post-marital emotional wasteland is sweetened with an almost Wodehousian sense of the preposterous."
